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MANALIVE

By G. K. CHESTERTON

THOMAS NELSON AND SONS

LONDON, EDINBURGH, DUBLIN
LEEDS, AND NEW YORK

LEIPZIG: 35-37 Konigstrasse. PARIS: 189, rue Saint- Jacques

First published in 1912.

CONTENTS.

PART I.

THE ENIGMAS OF INNOCENT
SMITH.

CHAP. PACK

I. How THE GREAT WIND CAME TO

BEACON HOUSE .... 7

I

II. THE LUGGAGE OF AN OPTIMIST . 36

III. THE BANNER OF BEACON . . .'63

IV. THE GARDEN OF THE GOD . . 90
V. THE ALLEGORICAL PRACTICAL JOKER . 119

PART II.

THE EXPLANATIONS OF INNOCENT
SMITH.

I. THE EYE OF DEATH ; OR, THE MURDER

CHARGE 173

II. THE Two CURATES ; OR, THE BURGLARY

CHARGE 229

720889

iv CONTENTS.

III. THE ROUND ROAD ; OR, THE DESERTION

CHARGE . . . . .291

IV. THE WILD WEDDINGS ; OR, THE PO-

LYGAMY CHARGE . . -339

V. How THE GREAT WIND WENT FROM

BEACON HOUSE .... 376

PART I.

THE
ENIGMAS OF INNOCENT SMITH.

Chapter I.

HOW THE GREAT WIND CAME TO
BEACON HOUSE.

^ WIND sprang high in the west, like a
wave of unreasonable happiness, and tore
eastward across England, trailing with it the
frosty scent of forests and the cold intoxi-
cation of the sea. In a million holes and
corners it refreshed a man like a flagon, and
astonished him like a blow. In the inmost
chambers of intricate and embowered houses
it woke like a domestic explosion, littering
the floor with some professor's papers till they
seemed as precious as fugitive, or blowing
out the candle by which a boy read "Treasure
Island" and wrapping him in roaring dark.
But everywhere it bore drama into undra-

18

8 MANALIVE.

matic lives, and carried the trump of crisis
across the world. Many a harassed mother
in a mean backyard had looked at five dwarf-
ish shirts on the clothes-line as at some small,
sick tragedy ; it was as if she had hanged
her five children. The wind came, and they
were full and kicking as if five fat imps had
sprung into them ; and far down in her
oppressed subconsciousness she half re-
membered those coarse comedies of her
fathers when the elves still dwelt in the
homes of men. Many an unnoticed girl
in a dank walled garden had tossed herself
into the hammock with the same intolerant
gesture with which she might have tossed
herself into the Thames ; and that wind
rent the waving wall of woods and lifted
the hammock like a balloon, and showed
her shapes of quaint cloud far beyond, and
pictures of bright villages far below, as if
she rode heaven in a fairy boat. Many a
dusty clerk or curate, plodding a telescopic

MANALIVE. 9

road of poplars, thought for the hundredth
time that they were like the plumes of a
hearse ; when this invisible energy caught
and swung and clashed them round his head
like a wreath or salutation of seraphic wings.
There was in it something more inspired and
authoritative even than the old wind of the
proverb ; for this was the good wind that
blows nobody harm.

The flying blast struck London just where
it scales the northern heights, terrace above
terrace, as precipitous as Edinburgh. It was
round about this place that some poet, pro-
bably drunk, looked up astonished at all
those streets gone skywards, and (thinking
vaguely of glaciers and roped mountaineers)
gave it the name of Swiss Cottage, which it
has never been able to shake off. At some
stage of those heights a terrace of tali
gray houses, mostly empty and almost as
desolate as the Grampians, curved round

at the western end, so that the last build-
la

io MANALIVE.

ing, a boarding establishment called " Beacon
House," offered abruptly to the sunset its
high, narrow, and towering termination, like
the prow of some deserted ship.

The ship, however, was not wholly deserted.
The proprietor of the boarding-house, a Mrs.
Duke, was one of those helpless persons upon
whom fate wars in vain ; she smiled vaguely
both before and after all her calamities ; she
was too soft to be hurt. But by the aid (or
rather under the orders) of a strenuous niece
she always kept the remains of a clientele,
mostly of young but listless folks. And
there were actually five inmates standing
disconsolately about the garden when the
great gale broke at the base of the termi-
nal tower behind them, as the sea bursts
against the base of an outstanding cliff.

All day that hill of houses over London
had been domed and sealed up with cold
cloud. Yet three men and two girls had
at last found even the gray and chilly garden

MANALIVE. 1 1

more tolerable than the black and cheerless
interior. When the wind came it split the
sky and shouldered the cloudland left and
right, unbarring great clear furnaces of even-
ing gold. The burst of light released and the
burst of air blowing seemed to come almost
simultaneously ; and the wind especially
caught everything in a throttling violence.
The bright short grass lay all one way like
brushed hair. Every shrub in the garden
tugged at its roots like a dog at the collar,
and strained every leaping leaf after the
hunting and exterminating element. Now
and again a twig would snap and fly like a bolt
from an arbalist. The three men stood stiffly
and aslant against the wind, as if leaning
against a wall. The two ladies disappeared
into the house ; rather, to speak truly, they
were blown into the house. Their two
frocks, blue and white, looked like two big
broken flowers, driving and drifting upon
the gale. Nor is such a poetic fancy in-

12 MANALIVE.

appropriate, for there was something oddly
romantic about this inrush of air and light
after a long, leaden, and unlifting day. Grass
and garden trees seemed glittering with some-
thing at once good and unnatural, like a fire
from fairyland. It seemed like a strange
sunrise at the wrong end of the day.

The girl in white dived in quickly
enough, for she wore a white hat of the
proportions of a parachute, which might
have wafted her away into the coloured
clouds of evening. She was their one
splash of splendour, and irradiated wealth
in that impecunious place (staying there
temporarily with a friend), an heiress in
a small way, by name Rosamund Hunt,
brown-eyed, round-faced, but resolute and
rather boisterous. On top of her wealth
she was good-humoured and rather good-
looking ; but she had not married, perhaps
because there was always a crowd of men
round her. She was not fast (though some

MANALI VE. 1 3

might have called her vulgar), but she gave
irresolute youths an impression of being at
once popular and inaccessible. A man felt
as if he had fallen in love with Cleopatra, or
as if he were asking for a great actress at the
stage door. Indeed, some theatrical spangles
seemed to cling about Miss Hunt : she played
the guitar and the mandoline ; she always
wanted charades ; and with that great rend-
ing of the sky by sun and storm, she felt a
girlish melodrama swell again within her.
To the crashing orchestration of the air
the clouds rose like the curtain of some
long-expected pantomime.

Nor, oddly enough, was the girl in blue
entirely unimpressed by this apocalypse in a
private garden ; though she was one of the
most prosaic and practical creatures alive.
She was, indeed, no other than the strenu-
ous niece whose strength alone upheld that
mansion of decay. But as the gale swung
and swelled the blue and white skirts till they

1 4 MANALIVE.

took on the monstrous mushroom contours
of Victorian crinolines, a sunken memory
stirred in her that was almost romance — a
memory of a dusty volume of Punch in an
aunt's house in infancy : pictures of crino-
line hoops and croquet hoops and some
pretty story, of which perhaps they were a
part. This half-perceptible fragrance in her
thoughts faded almost instantly, and Diana
Duke entered the house even more promptly
than her companion. Tall, slim, aquiline, and' c
dark, she seemed made for such swiftness.
In body she was of the breed of those birds
and beasts that are at once long and alert,
like greyhounds or herons or even like an
innocent snake. The whole house revolved
on her as on a rod of steel. It would be
wrong to say that she commanded ; for her
own efficiency was so impatient that she
obeyed herself before any one else obeyed
her. Before electricians could mend a bell
or locksmiths open a door, before dentists

MANALIVE. 1 5

could pluck a loose tooth or butlers draw
a tight cork, it was done already with the
silent violence of her slim hands. She was
light ; but there was nothing leaping about
her lightness. She spurned the ground, and
she meant to spurn it. People talk of the
pathos and failure of plain women ; but it
is a more terrible thing that a beautiful
woman may succeed in everything but
womanhood.

" It's enough to blow your head off," said
the young woman in white, going to the
looking-glass.

The young woman in blue made no reply,
but put away her gardening gloves, and then
went to the sideboard and began to spread
out an afternoon cloth for tea.

" Enough to blow your head off, I say,"
said Miss Rosamund Hunt, with the unruffled
cheeriness of one whose songs and speeches
had always been safe for an encore.

" Only your hat, I think," said Diana Duke ;

1 6 MANALIVE.

" but I dare say that is sometimes more im-
portant."

Rosamund's face showed for an instant the
offence of a spoilt child, and then the humour
of a very healthy person. She broke into a
laugh and said, " Well, it would have to
be a big wind to blow your head off."

There was another silence ; and the sunset
breaking more and more from the sundering
clouds, filled the room with soft fire and
painted the dull walls with ruby and gold.

" Somebody once told me," said Rosamund
Hunt, " that it's easier to keep one's head
when one has lost one's heart."

" Oh, don't talk about such rubbish," said
Diana with savage sharpness.

Outside, the garden was clad in a golden
splendour ; but the wind was still stiffly
blowing, and the three men who stood their
ground might also have considered the
problem of hats and heads. And, indeed,
their position, touching hats, was somewhat

MANALIVE. 17

typical of them. The tallest of the three
abode the blast in a high silk hat, which the
wind seemed to charge as vainly as that other
sullen tower, the house behind him. The
second man tried to hold on a stiff straw hat
at all angles, and ultimately held it in his
hand. The third had no hat, and, by his
attitude, seemed never to have had one in his
life. Perhaps this wind was a kind of fairy
wand to test men and women, for there was
much of the three men in this difference.

The man in the solid silk hat was the
embodiment of silkiness and solidity. He
was a big, bland, bored, and (as some said)
boring man, with flat fair hair and handsome
heavy features ; a prosperous young doctor
by the name of Warner. But if his blondness
and blandness seemed at first a little fatuous,
it is certain that he was no fool. If Rosamund
Hunt was the only person there with much
money, he was the only person who had as
yet found any kind of fame. His treatise

1 8 MANALIVE.

on " The Probable Existence of Pain in the
Lowest Organisms" had been universally
hailed by the scientific world as at once solid
and daring. In short, he undoubtedly had
brains ; and perhaps it was not his fault if
they were the kind of brains that most men
desire to analyze with a poker.

The young man who put his hat off and
on was a scientific amateur in a small way,
and worshipped the great Warner with a
solemn freshness. It was, in fact, at his in-
vitation that the distinguished doctor was
present ; for Warner lived in no such ram-
shackle lodging-house, but in a professional
palace in Harley Street. This young man
was really the youngest and best looking of
the three. But he was one of those persons,
both male and female, who seem doomed to
be good-looking and insignificant. Brown-
haired, high-coloured, and shy, he seemed to
lose the delicacy of his features in a sort of
blur of brown and red as he stood blushing

MANALIVE. 19

and blinking against the wind. He was one
of those obvious unnoticeable people : every
one knew that he was Arthur Inglewood,
unmarried, moral, decidedly intelligent, living
on a little money of his own, and hiding
himself in the two hobbies of photography
and cycling. Everybody knew him and
forgot him ; even as he stood there in the
glare of golden sunset there was something
about him indistinct, like one of his own
red-brown amateur photographs.

The third man had no hat ; he was lean,
in light, vaguely sporting clothes, and the
large pipe in his mouth made him look all
the leaner. He had a long ironical face,
blue-black hair, the blue eyes of an Irishman,
and the blue chin of an actor. An Irishman
he was, an actor he was not, except in the
old days of Miss Hunt's charades, being, as
a matter of fact, an obscure and flippant
journalist named Michael Moon. He had
once been hazily supposed to be reading for

20 MANALIVE.

the Bar ; but (as Warner would say with his
rather elephantine wit) it was mostly at
another kind of bar that his friends found
him. Moon, however, did not drink, nor
even frequently get drunk ; he simply was a
gentleman who liked low company. This
was partly because company is quieter than
society : and if he enjoyed talking to a bar-
maid (as apparently he did), it was chiefly
because the barmaid did the talking. More-
over he would often bring other talent to
assist her. He shared that strange trick of
all men of his type, intellectual and without
ambition — the trick of going about with his
mental inferiors. There was a small resilient
Jew named Moses Gould in the same boarding-
house, a little man whose negro vitality and
vulgarity amused Michael so much that he
went round with him from bar to bar, like
the owner of a performing monkey.

The colossal clearance which the wind had
made of that cloudy sky grew clearer and

MANALIVE. 21

clearer ; chamber within chamber seemed to
open in heaven. One felt one might at last
find something lighter than light. In the
fullness of this silent effulgence all things
collected their colours again : the gray trunks
turned silver, and the drab gravel gold. One
bird fluttered like a loosened leaf from one
tree to another, and his brown feathers were
brushed with fire.

" Inglewood," said Michael Moon, with
his blue eye on the bird, " have you any
friends ? "

Dr. Warner mistook the person addressed,
and turning a broad beaming face, said, —

" Oh yes, I go out a great deal."

Michael Moon gave a tragic grin, and
waited for his real informant, who spoke a
moment after in a voice curiously cool, fresh
and young, as coming out of that brown and
even dusty exterior.

" Really," answered Inglewood, " I'm
afraid I've lost touch with my old friends.

22 MAN ALIVE.

The greatest friend I ever had was at school,
a fellow named Smith. It's odd you should
mention it, because I was thinking of him
to-day, though I haven't seen him for seven
or eight years. He was on the science side
with me at school — a clever fellow though
queer ; and he went up to Oxford when I
went to Germany. The fact is, it's rather a
sad story. I often asked him to come and
see me, and when I heard nothing I made
inquiries, you know. I was shocked to learn
that poor Smith had gone off his head. The
accounts were a bit cloudy, of course, some
saying he had recovered again ; but they
always say that. About a year ago I got a
telegram from him myself. The telegram,
I'm sorry to say, put the matter beyond a
doubt."

" Quite so," assented Dr. Warner stolidly ;
" insanity is generally incurable."

" So is sanity," said the Irishman, and
studied him with a dreary eye.

MANALIVE. 23

" Symptoms ? " asked the doctor. " What
was this telegram ? "

" It's a shame to joke about such things,"
said Inglewood, in his honest, embarrassed
way ; " the telegram was Smith's illness, not
Smith. The actual words were, ' Man found
alive with two legs. '

" Alive with two legs," repeated Michael,
frowning. " Perhaps a version of alive and
kicking ? I don't know much about people
out of their senses ; but I suppose they ought
to be kicking."

" And people in their senses ? " asked
Warner, smiling.

" Oh, they ought to be kicked," said
Michael with sudden heartiness.

" The message is clearly insane," con-
tinued the impenetrable Warner. " The
best test is a reference to the un-
developed normal type. Even a baby
does not expect to find a man with three
legs."

24 MANALIVE.

" Three legs," said Michael Moon, " would
be very convenient in this wind."

A fresh eruption of the atmosphere had
indeed almost thrown them off their balance
and broken the blackened trees in the garden.
Beyond, all sorts of accidental objects could
be seen scouring the wind-scoured sky — straws,
sticks, rags, papers, and, in the distance, a
disappearing hat. Its disappearance, however,
was not final ; after an interval of minutes
they saw it again, much larger and closer,
a white panama, towering up into the heavens
like a balloon, staggering to and fro for an
instant like a stricken kite, and then settling
in the centre of their own lawn as falteringly
as a fallen leaf.

"Somebody's lost a good hat," said Dr.
Warner shortly.

Almost as he spoke, another object came
over the garden wall, flying after the fluttering
panama. It was a big green umbrella. After
that came hurtling a huge yellow Gladstone

MANALIVE. 25

bag, and after that came a figure like a flying
wheel of legs, as in the shield of the Isle of
Man.

But though for a flash it seemed to have
five or six legs, it alighted upon two, like
the man in the queer telegram. It took the
form of a large light-haired man in gay
green holiday clothes. He had bright blonde
hair that the wind brushed back like a
German's, a flushed eager face like a cherub's,
and a prominent pointing nose, a little like
a dog's. His head, however, was by no means
cherubic in the sense of being without a body.
On the contrary, on his vast shoulders and
shape generally gigantesque, his head looked
oddly and unnaturally small. This gave rise
to a scientific theory (which his conduct
fully supported) that he was an idiot.

Inglewood had a politeness instinctive and
yet awkward. His life was full of arrested
half gestures of assistance. And even this
prodigy of a big man in green, leaping the

26 MANALIVE.

wall like a bright green grasshopper, did not
paralyze that small altruism of his habits in
such a matter as a lost hat. He was stepping
forward to recover the green gentleman's
head-gear, when he was struck rigid with a
roar like a bull's.

" Unsportsmanlike ! " bellowed the big
man. " Give it fair play, give it fair play ! "
And he came after his own hat quickly but
cautiously, with burning eyes. The hat had
seemed at first to droop and dawdle as in
ostentatious languor on the sunny lawn ; but
the wind again freshening and rising, it went
dancing down the garden with the devilry
of a pas de quatre. The eccentric went
bounding after it with kangaroo leaps and
bursts of breathless speech, of which it was
not always easy to pick up the thread : " Fair
play, fair play . . . sport of kings . . .
chase their crowns . . . quite humane . . .
tramontana . . . cardinals chase red hats . . .

*

old English hunting . . . started a hat in

MANALIVE. 27

Bramber Combe . . . hat at bay . . .
mangled hounds. . . . Got him ! "

As the wind rose out of a roar into a
shriek, he leapt into the sky on his strong,
fantastic legs, snatched at the vanishing hat,
missed it, and pitched sprawling face fore-
most on the grass. The hat rose over him
like a bird in triumph. But its triumph was
premature ; for the lunatic, flung forward
on his hands, threw up his boots behind,
waved his two legs in the air like symbolic
ensigns (so that they thought again of the
telegram), and actually caught the hat with
his feet. A prolonged and piercing yell of
wind split the welkin from end to end. The
eyes of all the men were blinded by the
invisible blast, as by a strange, clear cataract
of transparency rushing between them and
all objects about them. But as the large
man fell back in a sitting posture and
solemnly crowned himself with the hat,
Michael found, to his incredulous surprise,

28 MANALIVE.

that he had been holding his breath, like a
man watching a duel.

While that tall wind was at the top of its
sky-scraping energy, another short cry was
heard, beginning very querulous, but ending
very quick, swallowed in abrupt silence.
The shiny black cylinder of Dr. Warner's
official hat sailed off his head in the long,
smooth parabola of an airship, and in almost
cresting a garden tree was caught in the
topmost branches. Another hat was gone.
Those in that garden felt themselves caught
in an unaccustomed eddy of things happen-
ing ; no one seemed to know what would
blow away next. Before they could specu-
late, the cheering and hallooing hat-hunter
was already halfway up the tree, swinging
himself from fork to fork with his strong,
bent, grasshopper legs, and still giving forth
his gasping, mysterious comments.

" Tree of life . . . Ygdrasil ... climb
for centuries perhaps . . . owls nesting in the

MANALIVE. 29

hat . . . remotest generations of owls . . . still
usurpers . . . gone to heaven . . . man in
the moon wears it ... brigand . . . not yours
. . . belongs to depressed medical man . . .
in garden . . . give it up ... give it up ! "
The tree swung and swept and thrashed
to and fro in the thundering wind like a
thistle, and flamed in the full sunshine like a
bonfire. The green, fantastic human figure,
vivid against its autumn red and gold, was
already among its highest and craziest
branches, which by bare luck did not break
with the weight of his big body. He was
up there among the last tossing leaves and
the first twinkling stars of evening, still talk-
ing to himself cheerfully, reasoningly, half
apologetically, in little gasps. He might
well be out of breath, for his whole pre-
posterous raid had gone with one rush ; he
had bounded the wall once like a football,
swept down the garden like a slide, and shot
up the tree like a rocket. The other three

3o MANALIVE.

men seemed buried under incident piled on
incident — a wild world where one thing began
before another thing left off. All three had
the first thought. The tree had been there
for the five years they had known the board-
ing-house. Each one of them was active and
strong. No one of them had even thought
of climbing it. Beyond that, Inglewood felt
first the mere fact of colour. The bright
brisk leaves, the bleak blue sky, the wild
green arms and legs, reminded him irra-
tionally of something glowing in his infancy,
something akin to a gaudy man on a golden
tree ; perhaps it was only a painted monkey
on a stick. Oddly enough, Michael Moon,
though more of a humorist, was touched on
a tenderer nerve, half remembered the old,
young theatricals with Rosamund, and was
amused to find himself almost quoting
Shakespeare —

" For valour. Is not love a Hercules,
Still climbing trees in the Hesperides ? "

MANALIVE. 31

Even the immovable man of science had
a bright, bewildered sensation that the Time
Machine had given a great jerk, and gone
forward with rather rattling rapidity.

He was not, however, wholly prepared
for what happened next. The man in green,
riding the frail topmost bough like a witch
on a very risky broomstick, reached up and
rent the black hat from its airy nest of twigs.
It had been broken across a heavy bough in
the first burst of its passage, a tangle of
branches had torn and scored and scratched
it in every direction, a clap of wind and
foliage had flattened it like a concertina ;
nor can it be said that the obliging gentle-
man with the sharp nose showed any
adequate tenderness for its structure when
he finally unhooked it from its place. When
he had found it, however, his proceedings
were by some counted singular. He waved
it with a loud whoop of triumph, and then
immediately appeared to fall backwards off

32 MAN ALIVE.

the tree, to which, however, he remained
attached by his long strong legs, like a
monkey swung by his tail. Hanging thus
head downwards above the unhelmed Warner,
he gravely proceeded to drop the battered silk
cylinder upon his brows. " Every man a
king," explained the inverted philosopher ;
" every hat [consequently] a crown. But
this is a crown out of heaven."

And he again attempted the coronation
of Warner, who, however, moved away with
great abruptness from the hovering diadem ;
not seeming, strangely enough, to wish for
his former decoration in its present state.

" Wrong, wrong ! " cried the obliging
person hilariously. "Always wear uniform,
even if it's shabby uniform ! Ritualists may
always be untidy. Go to a dance with soot
on your shirt-front ; but go with a shirt-
front. Huntsman wears old coat, but old
pink coat. Wear a topper, even if it's got
no top. It's the symbol that counts, old

MAN ALIVE. 33

cock. Ta!:e your hat, because it is your hat
after all ; its nap rubbed all off by the bark,
dears, and its brim not the least bit curled ;
but for old sakes' sake it is still, dears, the
nobbiest tile in the world."

Speaking thus, with a wild comfortable-
ness, he settled or smashed the shapeless silk
hat over the face of the disturbed physician,
and fell on his feet among the other men,
still talking, beaming and breathless.

" Why don't they make more games out
of the wind ? " he asked in some excitement.
" Kites are all right, but why should it only
be kites ? Why, I thought of three other
games for a windy day while I was climbing
that tree. Here's one of them : you take a
lot of pepper — "

" I think," interposed Moon, with a
sardonic mildness, " that your games are
already sufficiently interesting. Are you,
may I ask, a professional acrobat on a tour,
or a travelling advertisement of Sunny Jim ?

34 MANALIVE.

How and why do you display all this energy
for clearing walls and climbing trees in our
melancholy, but at least rational, suburbs ? "

The stranger, so far as so loud a person
was capable of it, appeared to grow con-
fidential.

" Well, it's a trick of my own," he con-
fessed candidly. " I do it by having two
legs."

Arthur Inglewood, who had sunk into the
background of this scene of folly, started and
stared at the newcomer with his short-
sighted eyes screwed up and his high colour
slightly heightened.

" Why, I believe you're Smith," he cried
with his fresh, almost boyish voice ; and then
after an instant's stare, " and yet I'm not
sure."

" I have a card, I think," said the un-
known, with baffling solemnity — " a card
with my real name, my titles, offices, and
true purpose on this earth."

MAN ALIVE. 35

He drew out slowly from an upper waist-
coat pocket a scarlet card-case, and as slowly
produced a very large card. Even in the
instant of its production, they fancied it was
of a queer shape, unlike the cards of ordinary
gentlemen. But it was there only for an
instant ; for as it passed from his ringers
to Arthur's, one or other slipped his hold.
The strident, tearing gale in that garden
carried away the stranger's card to join the
wild waste paper of the universe ; and that
great western wind shook the whole house
and passed.

Chapter II.
THE LUGGAGE OF AN OPTIMIST.

all remember the fairy tales of science
in our infancy, which played with the
supposition that large animals could jump in
the proportion of small ones. If an elephant
were as strong as a grasshopper, he could
(I suppose) spring clean out of the Zoological
Gardens and alight trumpeting upon Prim-
rose Hill. If a whale could leap from the
water like a trout, perhaps men might look
up and see one soaring above Yarmouth like
the winged island of Laputa. Such natural
energy, though sublime, might certainly be
inconvenient, and much of this inconvenience
attended the gaiety and good intentions of
the man in green. He was too large for

MANALIVE. 37

everything, because he was lively as well as
large. By a fortunate physical provision,
most very substantial creatures are also
reposeful ; and middle-class boarding-houses
in the lesser parts of London are not built
for a man as big as a bull and as excitable
as a kitten.

When Inglewood followed the stranger
into the boarding-house, he found him talk-
ing earnestly (and in his own opinion
privately) to the helpless Mrs. Duke. That
fat, faint lady could only goggle up like a
dying fish at the enormous new gentleman,
who politely offered himself as lodger, with
vast gestures of the wide white hat in one
hand and the yellow Gladstone bag in the
other. Fortunately, Mrs. Duke's more
efficient niece and partner was there to
complete the contract ; for, indeed, all the
people of the house had somehow collected
in the room. This fact, in truth, was typical
of the whole episode. The visitor created

38 MANALIVE.

an atmosphere of comic crisis ; and from the
time he came into the house to the time
he left it, he somehow got the company to
gather and even follow (though in derision),
as children gather and follow a Punch and
Judy. An hour ago, and for four years pre-
viously, these people had avoided each other,
even when they really liked each other.
They had slid in and out of dismal and
deserted rooms in search of particular news-
papers or private needlework. Even now
they all came casually, as with varying
interests ; but they all came. There was the
embarrassed Inglewood, still a sort of red
shadow ; there also the unembarrassed Warner,
a pallid but solid substance. There was
Michael Moon offering like a riddle the
contrast of the horsy crudeness of his
clothes and the sombre sagacity of his
visage. He was now joined by his yet more
comic crony, Moses Gould. Swaggering on
short legs with a prosperous purple tie, he

MANALIVE. 39

was the gayest of godless little dogs ; but
like a dog also in this, that however he
danced and wagged with delight, the two
dark eyes on each side of his protuberant
nose glistened gloomily like black buttons.
There was Miss Rosamund Hunt, still with
the fine white hat framing her square, good-
humoured face, and still with her native air
of being dressed for some party that never
came off. She also, like Mr. Moon, had a
new companion, new so far as this narrative
goes, but in reality an old friend and protegee.
This was a slight young woman in dark gray,
and in no way notable but for a load of dull
red hair, of which the shape somehow gave
her pale face that triangular, almost peaked,
appearance which was given by the lowering
headdress and deep rich ruff of the Eliza-
bethan beauties. Her surname seemed to
be Gray, and Miss Hunt called her Mary,
in that indescribable tone applied to an old
dependent who has practically become a

40 MANALIVE.

friend. She wore a small silver cross on
her very business-like gray clothes, and was
the only member of the party who went to
church. Last, but the reverse of least, there
was Diana Duke, studying the newcomer
with eyes of steel, and listening carefully
to every idiotic word he said. As for
Mrs. Duke, she smiled up at him, but
never dreamed of listening to him. She
had never really listened to any one in her
life ; which, some said, was why she had
survived.

Nevertheless, Mrs. Duke was pleased with
her new guest's concentration of courtesy
upon herself; for no one ever spoke seriously
to her any more than she listened seriously
to any one. And she almost beamed as the
stranger, with yet wider and almost whirling
gestures of explanation with his huge hat
and bag, apologized for having entered by
the wall instead of the front door. He was
understood to put it down to an unfortunate

MANALIVE. 41

family tradition of neatness and care of his
clothes.

" My mother was rather strict about it,
to tell the truth," he said, lowering his voice,
to Mrs. Duke. " She never liked me to
lose my cap at school. And when a man's
been taught to be tidy and neat it sticks to
him."

Mrs. Duke weakly gasped that she was
sure he must have had a good mother ; but
her niece seemed inclined to probe the
matter further.

" You've got a funny idea of neatness,"
she said, " if it's jumping garden walls and
clambering up garden trees. A man can't
very well climb a tree tidily."

" He can clear a wall neatly," said Michael
Moon ; " I saw him do it."

Smith seemed to be regarding the girl
with genuine astonishment. " My dear
young lady," he said, " I was tidying
the tree. You don't want last year's hats

2a

42 MANALIVE.

there, do you, any more than last year's
leaves ? The wind takes off the leaves, but
it couldn't manage the hat ; that wind,
I suppose, has tidied whole forests to-day.
Rum idea this is, that tidiness is a timid,
quiet sort of thing ; why, tidiness is a toil
for giants. You can't tidy anything without
untidying yourself; just look at my trousers.
Don't you know that ? Haven't you ever had
a spring cleaning ? "

" Oh yes, sir," said Mrs. Duke, almost
eagerly. " You will find everything of that
sort quite nice." For the first time she
had heard two words that she could under-
stand.

Miss Diana Duke seemed to be studying
the stranger in a sort of spasm of calculation ;
then her black eyes snapped with decision,
and she said that he could have a particular
bedroom on the top floor if he liked : and the
silent and sensitive Inglewood, who had been
on the rack through these cross-purposes,

MANALIVE. 43

eagerly offered to show him up to the room.
Smith went up the stairs four at a time, and
when he bumped his head against the ulti-
mate ceiling, Inglewood had an odd sensation
that the tall house was much shorter than it
used to be.

Arthur Inglewood followed his old friend
— or his new friend, for he did not very
clearly know which he was. The face looked
very like his old schoolfellow's at one second
and very unlike at another. And when
Inglewood broke through his native polite-
ness so far as to say suddenly, " Is your name
Smith ? " he received only the unenlightening
reply, "Quite right ; quite right. Very
good. Excellent ! " Which appeared to
Inglewood, on reflection, rather the speech
of a new-born babe accepting a name than
of a grown-up man admitting one.

Despite these doubts about identity, the
hapless Inglewood watched the other unpack,
and stood about his bedroom in all the im-

44 MANALIVE.

potent attitudes of the male friend. Mr.
Smith unpacked with the same kind of
whirling accuracy with which he climbed
a tree — throwing things out of his bag as
if they were rubbish, yet managing to dis-
tribute quite a regular pattern all round him
on the floor.

As he did so he continued to talk in the
same somewhat gasping manner (he had
come upstairs four steps at a time, but
even without this his style of speech was
breathless and fragmentary), and his remarks
were still a string of more or less significant
but often separate pictures.

" Like the day of judgment," he said,
throwing a bottle so that it somehow settled,
rocking on its right end. " People say vast
universe . . . infinity and astronomy ; not
sure ... I think things are too close to-
gether . . . packed up ; for travelling . . .
stars too close really . . . why, the sun's
a star, too close to be seen properly ; the

MANALIVE. 45

earth s a star, too close to be seen at all ...
too many pebbles on the beach ; ought all
to be put in rings ; too many blades of grass
to study . . . feathers on a bird make the
brain reel ; wait till the big bag is un-
packed . . . may all be put in our right
places then."

Here he stopped, literally for breath —
throwing a shirt to the other end of the
room, and then a bottle of ink so that it fell
quite neatly beyond it. Inglewood looked
round on this strange, half-symmetrical dis-
order with an increasing doubt.

In fact, the more one explored Mr. Smith's
holiday luggage, the less one could make any-
thing of it. One peculiarity of it was that
almost everything seemed to be there for the
wrong reason ; what is secondary with every
one else was primary with him. He would
wrap up a pot or pan in brown paper ; and
the unthinking assistant would discover that
the pot was valueless or even unnecessary,

46 MANALIVE.

and that it was the brown paper that was
truly precious. He produced two or three
boxes of cigars, and explained with plain and
perplexing sincerity that he was no smoker,
but that cigar-box wood was by far the best
for fretwork. He also exhibited about six
small bottles of wine, white and red ; and
Inglewood, happening to note a Volnay
which he knew to be excellent, supposed
at first that the stranger was an epicure in
vintages. He was therefore surprised to
find that the next bottle was a vile
sham claret from the colonies, which
even colonials (to do them justice) do
not drink. It was only then that he
observed that all six bottles had those
bright metallic seals of various tints,
and seemed to have been chosen solely
because they gave the three primary and
three secondary colours : red, blue, and
yellow ; green, violet, and orange. There
grew upon Inglewood an almost creepy sense

MANALIVE. 47

of the real childishness of this creature. For
Smith was really, so far as human psychology
can be, innocent. He had the sensualities of
innocence : he loved the stickiness of gum, and
he cut white wood greedily as if he were
cutting a cake. To this man wine was not
a doubtful thing to be defended or denounced ;
it was a quaintly-coloured syrup, such as a
child sees in a shop window. He talked
dominantly and rushed the social situation ;
but he was not asserting himself, like a super-
man in a modern play. He was simply for-
getting himself, like a little boy at a party.
He had somehow made a giant stride from
babyhood to manhood, and missed that crisis
in youth when most of us grow old.

As he shunted his big bag, Arthur observed
the initials I. S. printed on one side of it, and
remembered that Smith had been called Inno-
cent Smith at school, though whether as a
formal Christian name or a moral description
he could not remember. He was just about

48 MANALIVE.

to venture another question, when there was
a knock at the door, and the short figure of
Mr. Gould offered itself, with the melan-
choly Moon, standing like his tall crooked
shadow, behind him. They had drifted up
the stairs after the other two men with the
wandering gregariousness of the male.

" Hope there's no intrusion," said the
beaming Moses with a glow of good nature,
but not the airiest tinge of apology.

" The truth is," said Michael Moon with
comparative courtesy, "we thought we might
see if they had made you comfortable. Miss
Duke is rather — "

" I know," cried the stranger, looking up
radiantly from his bag ; " magnificent, isn't
she ? Go close to her — hear military music
going by, like Joan of Arc."

Inglewood started and stared at the speaker
like one who has just heard a wild fairy
tale, which nevertheless contains one small
and forgotten fact. For he remembered

MANALIVE. 49

how he had himself thought of Jeanne
d'Arc years ago, when, hardly more than
a schoolboy, he had first come to the board-
ing-house. Long since the pulverizing ration-
alism of his friend Dr. Warner had crushed
such youthful ignorances and disproportionate
dreams. Under the Warnerian scepticism and
science of hopeless human types, Inglewood
had long come to regard himself as a timid, in-
sufficient, and "weak" type, who would never
marry ; to regard Diana Duke as a material-
istic maidservant ; and to regard his first
fancy for her as the small, dull farce of a
collegian kissing his landlady's daughter.
And yet the phrase about military music
moved him queerly, as if he had heard
those distant drums.

" She has to keep things pretty tight, as
is only natural," said Moon, glancing round
the rather dwarfish room, with its wedge of
slanted ceiling, like the conical hood of a
dwarf.

5o MANALIVE.

" Rather a small box for you, sir," said the
waggish Mr. Gould.

" Splendid room, though," answered Mr.
Smith enthusiastically, with his head inside
his Gladstone bag. " I love these pointed
sorts of rooms, like Gothic. By the way,"
he cried out, pointing in quite a startling
way, " where does that door lead to ? "

" To certain death, I should say," answered
Michael Moon, staring up at a dust-stained
and disused trapdoor in the sloping roof of
the attic. " I don't think there's a loft
there ; and I don't know what else it
could lead to." Long before he had finished
his sentence the man with the strong green
legs had leapt at the door in the ceiling,
swung himself somehow on to the ledge
beneath it, wrenched it open after a struggle,
and clambered through it. For a moment
they saw the two symbolic legs standing
like a truncated statue ; then they vanished.
Through the hole thus burst in the roof

MANALIVE. 51

appeared the empty and lucid sky of evening,
with one great many-coloured cloud sailing
across it like a whole county upside down.

" Hullo, you fellows ! " came the far cry
of Innocent Smith, apparently from some
remote pinnacle. " Come up here ; and
bring some of my things to eat and drink.
It's just the spot for a picnic."

With a sudden impulse Michael snatched
two of the small wine bottles, one in each
solid fist ; and Arthur Inglewood, as if mes-
merized, groped for a biscuit tin and a big
jar of ginger. The enormous hand of Inno-
cent Smith appearing through the aperture,
like a giant's in a fairy tale, received these
tributes and bore them off to the eyrie ;
then they both hoisted themselves out of
the window. They were both athletic,
and even gymnastic ; Inglewood through
his concern for hygiene, and Moon through
his concern for sport, which was not quite
SO idle and inactive as that of the average

52 MANALIVE.

sportsman. Also they both had a light-
headed celestial sensation when the door
was burst in the roof, as if a door had been
burst in the sky, and they could climb on to
the very roof of the universe. (They were
both men who had long been unconsciously
imprisoned in the commonplace^ though one
took it comically, and the other seriously.
They were both men, nevertheless, in whom
sentiment had never died. But Mr. Moses
Gould had an equal contempt for their sui-
cidal athletics and their subconscious tran-
scendentalism, and he stood and laughed at
the thing with the shameless rationality of
another race.

When the singular Smith, astride of a
chimney-pot, learnt that Gould was not
following, his infantile officiousness and good
nature forced him to dive back into the attic
to comfort or persuade ; and Inglewood and
Moon were left alone on the long gray-green
ridge of the slate roof, with their feet against

MANALIVE. 53

gutters and their backs against chimney-pots,
looking agnostically at each other. Their
first feeling was that they had come out
into eternity, and that eternity was very like
topsy-turvydom. One definition occurred
to one of them — that he had come out into
the light of that lucid and radiant ignorance
in which all beliefs had begun. The sky
above them was full of mythology. Heaven
seemed deep enough to hold all the gods.
The round of the ether turned from green
to yellow gradually like a great unripe fruit.
All around the sunken sun it was like a
lemon ; round all the east it was a sort of
golden green, more suggestive of a green-
gage ; but the whole had still the emptiness
of daylight and none of the secrecy of dusk.
Tumbled here and there across this gold and
pale green were shards and shattered masses
of inky purple cloud, which seemed falling to-
wards the earth in every kind of colossal per-
spective. One of them really had the character

54 MANALIVE.

of some many-mitred, many-bearded, many-
winged Assyrian image, huge head downwards,
hurled out of heaven — a sort of false Jehovah,
who was perhaps Satan. All the other clouds
had preposterous pinnacled shapes, as if the
god's palaces had been flung after him.

And yet, while the empty heaven was full
of silent catastrophe, the height of human
buildings above which they sat held here and
there a tiny and trivial noise that was the
exact antithesis ; and they heard some six
streets below a newsboy calling, and a bell
bidding to chapel. They could also hear talk
out of the garden below ; and realized that
the irrepressible Smith must have followed
Gould downstairs, for his eager and pleading
accents could be heard, followed by the half-
humorous protests of Miss Duke and the
full and very youthful laughter of Rosamund
Hunt. The air had that cold kindness that
comes after a storm. Michael Moon drank
it in with as serious a relish as he had drunk

MANALIVE. 55

the little bottle of cheap claret, which he had
emptied almost at a draught. Inglewood
went on eating ginger very slowly and with a
solemnity unfathomable as the sky above him.
There was still enough stir in the freshness
of the atmosphere to make them almost
fancy they could smell the garden soil and
the last roses of the autumn. Suddenly there
came from the darkening garden a silvery
ping and pong which told them that Rosa-
mund had brought out the long-neglected
mandoline. After the first few notes there
was more of the distant bell-like laughter.

" Inglewood," said Michael Moon, " have
you ever heard that I am a blackguard ? "

" I haven't heard it, and I don't believe it,"
answered Inglewood, after an odd pause.
" But I have heard you were — what they
call rather wild."

" If you have heard that I am wild, you
can contradict the rumour," said Moon, with
an extraordinary calm ; " I am tame. I am

56 MANALIVE.

quite tame ; I am about the tamest beast that
crawls. I drink too much of the same kind
of whisky at the same time every night.
I even drink about the same amount too
much. I go to the same number of public-
houses. I meet the same damned women
with mauve faces. I hear the same number
of dirty stories — generally the same dirty
stories. j^ou rnay reassure my friends,
Inglewood, you see before you a person
whom civilization has thoroughly tamed?"

Arthur Inglewood was staring with feelings
that made him nearly fall off the roof, for
indeed the Irishman's face, always sinister,
was now almost demoniacal.

" Christ confound it ! " cried out Moon,
suddenly clutching the empty claret bottle ;
" this is about the thinnest and filthiest wine
I ever uncorked, and it's the only drink I
have really enjoyed for nine years. I was
never wild until just ten minutes ago." And
he sent the bottle whizzing, a wheel of glass,

MANALIVE. 57

far away beyond the garden into the road,
where, in the profound evening silence, they
could even hear it break and part upon the
stones.

" Moon," said Arthur Inglewood, rather
huskily, " you mustn't be so bitter about it.
Everybody has to take the world as he finds
it ; of course one often finds it a bit dull — "

"That fellow doesn't," said Michael de-
cisively ; " I mean that fellow Smith. I have
a fancy there's some method in his madness.
It looks as if he could turn into a sort of
wonderland any minute by taking one step
out of the plain road. Who would have
thought of that trapdoor ? Who would have
thought that this cursed colonial claret could
taste quite nice among the chimney-pots?
Perhaps that is the real key of fairyland.
Perhaps Nosey Gould's beastly little Empire
Cigarettes ought only to be smoked on stilts,
or something of that sort. Perhaps Mrs.
Duke's cold leg of mutton would seem quite

58 MANALIVE.

appetizing at the top of a tree. Perhaps
even my damned, dirty, monotonous drizzle
of Old Bill Whisky—"

" Don't be rough on yourself," said Ingle-
wood, in serious distress. " The dullness
isn't your fault or the whisky's. Fellows
who don't — fellows like me I mean — have
just the same feeling that it's all rather flat
and a failure. But the world's made like that ;
it's all survival. Some people are made to
get on, like Warner ; and some people are
made to stick quiet, like me. You can't
help your temperament. I know you're
much cleverer than I am ; but you can't
help having all the loose ways of a poor
literary chap, and I can't help having all the
doubts and helplessness of a small scientific
chap, any more than a fish can help floating
or a fern help curling up. Humanity, as
Warner said so well in that lecture, really
consists of quite different tribes of animals
all disguised as men."

MANALIVE. 59

In the dim garden below the buzz of
talk was suddenly broken by Miss Hunt's
musical instrument banging with the abrupt-
ness of artillery into a vulgar but spirited
tune.

Rosamund's voice came up rich and strong
in the words of some fatuous, fashionable
coon song : —

" Darkies sing a song on the old plantation,
Sing it as we sang it in the days long since gone by."

Inglewood's brown eyes softened and sad-
dened still more as he continued his mono-
logue of resignation to such a rollicking and
romantic tune. But the blue eyes of Michael
Moon brightened and hardened with a light
that Inglewood did not understand. Many
centuries, and many villages and valleys,
would have been happier if Inglewood or
Inglewood's countrymen had ever understood
that light, or guessed at the first blink that
it was the battle star of Ireland.

" Nothing can ever alter it ; it's in the

60 MANALIVE.

wheels of the universe," went on Inglewood,
in a low voice : " some men are weak and
some strong, and the only thing we can do
is to know that we are weak. (J^have been
in love lots of times, but I could not do any-
thing, for I remembered my own fickleness.
I have formed opinions, but I haven't the
cheek to push them, because I've so often
changed them. That's the upshot, old fel-
low. We can't trust ourselves — and we
can't help S//

Michael had risen to his feet, and stood
poised in a perilous position at the end of
the roof, like some dark statue hung above
its gable. Behind him, huge clouds of an
almost impossible purple turned slowly topsy-
turvy in the silent anarchy of heaven. Their
gyration made the dark figure seem yet
dizzier.

" Let us ..." he said, and was suddenly
silent.

" Let us what ? " asked Arthur Inglewood,

MANALIVE. 6 1

rising equally quick though somewhat more
cautiously, for his friend seemed to find some
difficulty in speech.

" Let us go and do some of these things
we can't do," said Michael.

At the same moment there burst out of
the trapdoor below them the cockatoo hair
and flushed face of Innocent Smith, calling
to them that they must come down as
the " concert " was in full swing, and Mr.
Moses Gould about to recite " Young Loch-
invar."

As they dropped into Innocent's attic they
nearly tumbled over its entertaining impedi-
menta again. Inglewood, staring at the
littered floor, thought instinctively of the
littered floor of a nursery. He was therefore
the more moved, and even shocked, when his
eye fell on a large well-polished American
revolver.

" Hullo ! " he cried, stepping back from the
steely glitter as men step back from a serpent ;

62 MANALIVE.

" are you afraid of burglars ? or when and
why do you deal death out of that machine
gun ? "

" Oh, that ! " said Smith, throwing it a
single glance ; " I deal life out of that," and
he went bounding down the stairs.

Chapter III.
THE BANNER OF BEACON.

ALL next day at Beacon House there was
a crazy sense that it was everybody's
birthday. It is the fashion to talk of insti-
tutions as cold and cramping things. The
truth is jhat-wlien people are in exceptionally
high spirits, really wild with freedom and
invention, thcy^always must, and they always^,^.
do, Qreate^institutions. When men arcjweary /
the]j^fallinto anarchy ; hlLL2^bi!^-they arp
gay agg vigorous iheyJjivariably make rules.
This, which is true of all the churches and
republics of history, is also true of the most
trivial parlour game or the most unsophisti-
cated meadow romp. We are__nej

64 MANALIVE.

until some institution^ frees us, ^nd liberty
cannot exist till it is declared by authority.
Even the wild authority of the harlequtft-
Smith was still authority, because it produced
everywhere a crop of crazy regulations and
conditions. He filled every one with his
own half -lunatic life ; but it was not
expressed in destruction, but rather in a
dizzy and toppling construction. Each
person with a hobby found it turning into
an institution. Rosamund's songs seemed
to coalesce into a kind of opera ; Michael's
jests and paragraphs into a magazine. His
pipe and her mandoline seemed between them
to make a sort of smoking concert. The
bashful and bewildered Arthur Inglewood
almost struggled against his own growing
importance. He felt as if, in spite of him,
his photographs were turning into a picture
gallery, and his bicycle into a gymkhana.
But no one had any time to criticize these
impromptu estates and offices, for they fol-

MANALIVE. 65

lowed each other in wild succession like the
topics of a rambling talker.

Existence with such a man was an obstacle

race made of pleasant obstacles.^ Out of any
homely"arid trivial object he could drag reels
of exaggeration, like a conjurer. Nothing
could be more shy and impersonal than poor
Arthur's photography. Yet the preposterous
Smith was seen assisting him eagerly through
sunny morning hours, and an indefensible
sequence described as "Moral Photography"
began to unroll itself about the boarding-
house. It was only a version of the old
photographer's joke which produces the same
figure twice on one plate, making a man
play chess with himself, dine with himself,
'and so on. But these plates were more mysti-
cal and ambitious — as, "Miss Hunt forgets
Herself," showing that lady answering her
own too rapturous recognition with a most ap-
palling stare of ignorance ; or " Mr. Moon
questions Himself," in which Mr. Moon

66 MANALIVE.

appeared as one driven to madness under
his own legal cross-examination, which was
conducted with a long forefinger and an air
of ferocious waggery. One highly success-
ful trilogy — representing Inglewood recog-
nizing Inglewood, Inglewood prostrating
himself before Inglewood, and Inglewood
severely beating Inglewood with an umbrella
— Innocent Smith wanted to have enlarged
and put up in the hall, like a sort of fresco,
with the inscription, —

" Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control —
These three alone will make a man a prig."

TENNYSON.

Nothing, again, could be more prosaic
and impenetrable than the domestic energies
of Miss Diana Duke. But Innocent had
somehow blundered on the discovery that
her thrifty dressmaking went with a
considerable feminine care for dress — the
one feminine thing that had never failed
her solitary self-respect. In consequence

MANALIVE. 67

Smith pestered her with a theory (which
he really seemed to take seriously) that
ladies might combine economy with mag-
nificence if they would draw light chalk
patterns on a plain dress and then dust them
off again. He set up " Smith's Lightning
Dressmaking Company " with two screens,
a cardboard placard, and box of bright soft
crayons ; and Miss Diana actually threw
him an abandoned black overall or working
dress on which to exercise the talents of a
modiste. He promptly produced for her
a garment aflame with red and gold sun-
flowers ; she held it up an instant to her
shoulders, and looked like an empress. And
Arthur Inglewood, some hours afterwards
cleaning his bicycle (with his usual air of
being inextricably hidden in it), glanced up ;
and his hot face grew hotter, for Diana
stood laughing for one flash in the doorway,
and her dark robe was rich with the green
and purple of great decorative peacocks, like

68 MANALIVE.

a secret garden in the " Arabian Nights." A
pang too swift to be named pain or pleasure
went through his heart like an old-world
rapier. He remembered how pretty he
thought her years ago, when he was ready
to fall in love with anybody ; but it was
like remembering a worship of some Baby-
lonian princess in some previous existence.
At his next glimpse of her (and he caught
himself awaiting it) the purple and green
chalk was dusted off, and she went by
quickly in her working clothes.

As for Mrs. Duke, none who knew that
matron could conceive her as actively re-
sisting this invasion that had turned her
house upside down. But among the most
exact observers it was seriously believed that
she liked it. For she was one of those
women who at bottom regard all men as
equally mad, wild animals of some utterly
separate species. And it is doubtful if she
really saw anything more eccentric or in-

MANALIVE. 69

explicable in Smith's chimney-pot picnics
or crimson sunflowers than she had in the
chemicals of Inglewood or the sardonic
speeches of Moon. Courtesy, on the other
hand, is a thing that any one can understand,
and Smith's manners were as courteous as
they were unconventional. She said he was
" a real gentleman," by which she simply
meant a kind-hearted man, which is a very
different thing. She would sit at the head
of the table with fat, folded hands and a
fat, folded smile for hours and hours, while
every one else was talking at once. At
least, the only other exception was Rosa-
mund's companion, MaryjGray, whose silence
was of a much more eager sort. Though
she nfter_sokff she Alwas lookedafshc

might speak Jtny^ minute. Perhaps this is
the very dcfinitionof^ a companion. Inno-
cent Smith seemed to throw himself, as into
other adventures, into the adventure of
making her talk. He never succeeded, yet

70 MANALIVE.

he was never snubbed ; if he achieved any-
thing, it was only to draw attention to this
quiet figure, and to turn her, by ever so
little, from a modesty to a mystery. But
if she was a riddle, every one recognized
that she was a fresh and unspoilt riddle,
like the riddle of the sky and the woods
in spring. Indeed, though she was rather
older than the other two girls, she had an
early morning ardour, a fresh earnestness of
youth, which Rosamund seemed to have
lost in the mere spending of money, and
Diana in the mere guarding of it. Smith
looked at her again and again. Her eyes
and mouth were set in her face the wrong
way — which was really the right way. She
had the knack of saying everything with
her face : her silence was a sort of steady
applause.

But among the hilarious experiments of
that holiday (which seemed more like a
week's holiday than a day's) one experiment

MANALIVE. 71

towers supreme, not because it was any
sillier or more successful than the others,
but because out of this particular folly
flowed all the odd events that were to
follow. All the other practical jokes ex-
ploded of themselves, and left vacancy ; all
the other fictions returned upon themselves,
and were finished like a song. But the
string of solid and startling events — which
were to include a hansom cab, a detective,
a pistol, and a marriage licence — were all
made primarily possible by the joke about
the High Court of Beacon.

It had originated, not with Innocent
Smith, but with Michael Moon. He was
in a strange glow and pressure of spirits,
and talked incessantly ; yet he had never
been more sarcastic, and even inhuman.
He used his old useless knowledge as a
barrister to talk entertainingly of a tribunal
that was a parody on the pompous anomalies
of English law. The High Court of Beacon,

72 MANALIVE.

he declared, was a splendid example of our
free and sensible constitution. It had been
founded by King John in defiance of Magna
Carta, and now held absolute power over
windmills, wine and spirit licences, ladies
travelling in Turkey, revision of sentences
for dog -stealing and parricide, as well as
anything whatever that happened in the
town of Market Bosworth. The whole
hundred and nine seneschals of the High
Court of Beacon met once in every four
centuries ; but in the intervals (as Mr.
Moon explained) the whole powers of the
institution were vested in Mrs. Duke. Tossed
about among the rest of the company, how-
ever, the High Court did not retain its
historical and legal seriousness, but was used
somewhat unscrupulously in a riot of domestic
detail. If somebody spilt the Worcester
Sauce on the tablecloth, he was quite sure
it was a rite without which the sittings
and findings of the Court would be invalid ;

MANALIVE. 73

or if somebody wanted a window to remain
shut, he would suddenly remember that none
but the third son of the lord of the manor
of Penge had the right to open it. They
even went the length of making arrests and
conducting criminal inquiries. The pro-
posed trial of Moses Gould for patriotism
was rather above the heads of the company,
especially of the criminal ; but the trial of
Inglewood on a charge of photographic libel,
and his triumphant acquittal upon a plea
of insanity, were admitted to be in the best
traditions of the Court.

But when Smith was in wild spirits he
grew more and more serious, not more and
more flippant like Michael Moon. This
proposal of a private court of justice, which
Moon had thrown off with the detachment
of a political humorist, Smith really caught
hold of with the eagerness of an abstract
philosopher. It was by far the best thing

they could do, he declared, to claim sover-
3 a

74 MANALIVE.

eign powers even for the individual house-
hold.

" You believe in Home Rule for Ireland ;
I believe in Home Rule for homes," he
cried eagerly to Michael. " It would be
better if every father could kill his son, as
with the old Romans ; it would be better,
because nobody would be killed. Let's issue
a Declaration of Independence from Beacon
House. We could grow enough greens in
that garden to support us, and when the
tax-collector comes let's tell him we're self-
supporting, and play on him with the hose.
. . . Well, perhaps, as you say, we couldn't
very well have a hose, as that comes from
the main ; but we could sink a well in this
chalk, and a lot could be done with water-
jugs. . . . Let this be really Beacon House.
Let's light a bonfire of independence on the
roof, and see house after house answering
it across the valley of the Thames ! Let us
begin the League of the Free Families !

MANALIVE. 75

Away with Local Government ! A fig for
Local Patriotism ! Let every house be a
sovereign state as this is, and judge its own
children by its own law, as we do by the
Court of Beacon. Let us cut the painter,
and begin to be happy together, as if we
were on a desert island."

" I know that desert island," said Michael
Moon ; " it only exists in the 'Swiss Family
Robinson.' A man feels a strange desire for
some sort of vegetable milk, and crash comes
down some unexpected cocoa-nut from some
undiscovered monkey. A literary man feels
inclined to pen a sonnet, and at once an
officious porcupine rushes out of a thicket
and shoots out one of his quills."

" Don't you say a word against the ' Swiss
Family Robinson,' " cried Innocent with
great warmth. " It mayn't be exact science,
but it's dead accurate philosophy. When
you're really shipwrecked, you do really find
what you want. When you're really on a

76 MANALIVE.

desert island, you never find it a desert. If
we were really besieged in this garden, we'd
find a hundred English birds and English
berries that we never knew were here. If we
were snowed up in this room, we'd be the
better for reading scores of books in that book-
case that we don't even know are there ; we'd
have talks with each other, good, terrible
talks, that we shall go to the grave without
guessing ; we'd find materials for everything
— christening, marriage, or funeral ; yes, even
for a coronation — if we didn't decide to be
a republic."

" A coronation on ' Swiss Family ' lines, I
suppose," said Michael, laughing. " Oh, I
know you would find everything in that
atmosphere. If we wanted such a simple
thing, for instance, as a Coronation Canopy,
we should walk down beyond the geraniums
and find the Canopy Tree in full bloom. If
we wanted such a trifle as a crown of gold,
why, we should be digging up dandelions,

MANALIVE. 77

and we should find a gold mine under the
lawn. And when we wanted oil for the
ceremony, why, I suppose a great storm
would wash everything on shore, and we
should find there was a Whale on the
premises."

" And so there is a Whale on the premises
for all you know," asseverated Smith, striking
the table with passion. " I bet you've never
examined the premises ! I bet you've never
been round at the back as I was this morning
— for I found the very thing you say could
only grow on a tree. There's an old sort
of square tent up against the dustbin ; it's
got three holes in the canvas, and a pole's
broken, so it's not much good as a tent, but
as a Canopy — " And his voice quite failed
him to express its shining adequacy ; then
he went on with controversial eagerness :
" You see I take every challenge as you
make it. I believe every blessed thing you
say couldn't be here has been here all the

78 MANALIVE.

time. You say you want a whale washed
up for oil. Why, there's oil in that cruet-
stand at your elbow ; and I don't believe
anybody has touched it or thought of it for
years. And for your gold crown, we're
none of us wealthy here, but we could
collect enough ten-shilling bits from our
own pockets to string round a man's head for
half an hour ; or one of Miss Hunt's gold
bangles is nearly big enough to — "

The good-humoured Rosamund was almost
choking with laughter. " All is not gold
that glitters," she said ; " and besides — "

" What a mistake that is ! " cried Inno-
cent Smith, leaping up in great excitement.
" All is gold that glitters — especially now
we are a Sovereign State. What's the good
of a Sovereign State if you can't define a
sovereign ? We can make anything a pre-
cious metal, as men could in the morning
of the world. They didn't choose gold
because it was rare ; your scientists can tell

MANALIVE. 79

you twenty sorts of slime much rarer. They
chose gpld because it was bright — because it
was a thing hard to find, but pretty when
you've found it. You can't fight with
golden swords or eat golden biscuits ; you
can only look at it — and you can look at it
out here."

With one of his incalculable motions he
sprang back and burst open the doors into the
garden. At the same time also, with one
of his gestures that never seemed at the
instant so unconventional as they were, he
stretched out his hand to Mary Gray, and
led her out on to the lawn as if for a dance.

The French windows, thus flung open, let
in an evening even lovelier than that of the
day before. The west was swimming with
sanguine colours, and a sort of sleepy flame
lay along the lawn. The twisted shadows
of the one or two garden trees showed upon
this sheen, not gray or black, as in common
daylight, but like arabesques written in vivid

8o MANALIVE.

violet ink on some page of Eastern gold.
The sunset was one of those festive and yet
mysterious conflagrations in which common
things by their colours remind us of costly
or curious things. The slates upon the
sloping roof burned like the plumes of a
vast peacock, in every mysterious blend of
blue and green. The red-brown bricks of
the wall glowed with all the October tints
of strong ruby and tawny wines. The sun
seemed to set each object alight with a
different coloured flame, like a man lighting
fireworks ; and even Innocent's hair, which
was of a rather colourless fairness, seemed to
have a flame of pagan gold on it as he strode
across the lawn towards the one tall ridge of
rockery.

" What would be the good of gold," he
was saying, " if it did not glitter ? Why
should we care for a black sovereign any
more than a black sun at noon ? A black
button would do just as well. Don't you see

MANALI VE. 8 1

that everything in this yard looks like a
jewel ? And will you kindly tell me what
'the deuce is the good of a jewel except that
it looks like a jewel ? Leave off buying and
selling, and start looking ! Open your eyes,
and you'll wake up in the New Jerusalem.

11 All is gold that glitters-
Tree and tower of brass ;

Rolls the golden evening air
Down the golden grass.

Kick the cry to Jericho,
How yellow mud is sold ;

All is gold that glitters,
For the glitter is the gold."

" And who wrote that ? " asked Rosa-
mund, amused.

" No one will ever write it," answered
Smith, and cleared the rockery with a flying
leap.

" Really," said Rosamund to Michael
Moon, " he ought to be sent to an asylum.
Don't you think so ? "

" I beg your pardon," inquired Michael,

82 MANALIVE.

rather sombrely ; his long, swarthy head
was dark against the sunset, and, either by
accident or mood, he had the look of some-
thing isolated and even hostile amid the
social extravagance of the garden.

" I only said Mr. Smith ought to go to
an asylum," repeated the lady.

The lean face seemed to grow longer and
longer, for Moon was unmistakably sneering.
" No," he said ; " I don't think it's at all
necessary."

" What do you mean ? " asked Rosamund
quickly. " Why not ? "

" Because he is in one now," answered
Michael Moon, in a quiet but ugly voice.
" Why, didn't you know ? "

" What ? " cried the girl, and there was a
break in her voice ; for the Irishman's face
and voice were really almost creepy. With his
dark figure and dark sayings in all that sun-
shine he looked like the devil in paradise.

" I'm sorry," he continued, with a sort of

MANALIVE. 83

harsh humility. " Of course we don't talk
about it much . . . but I thought we all
really knew."

" Knew what ? "

" Well," answered Moon, " that Beacon
House is a certain rather singular sort of
house — a house with the tiles loose, shall
we say ? Innocent Smith is only the doctor
that visits us ; hadn't you come when he
called before ? As most of our maladies are
melancholic, of course he has to be extra
cheery. Sanity, of course, seems a very
bumptious eccentric thing to us. Jumping
over a wall, climbing a tree — that's his bed-
side manner."

" You daren't say such a thing ! " cried
Rosamund in a rage. " You dcren't suggest
that I—"

" Not more than I am," said Michael
soothingly ; " not more than the rest of us.
Haven't you ever noticed that Miss Duke
never sits still — a notorious sign ? Haven't

84 MANALIVE.

you ever observed that Inglewood is always
washing his hands — a known mark of mental
disease ? I, of course, am a dipsomaniac."

" I don't believe you," broke out his
companion, not without agitation. " I've
heard you had some bad habits — "

" All habits are bad habits," said Michael,
with deadly calm. " Madness does not come
by breaking out, but by giving in ; by set-
tling down in some dirty, little, self-repeat-
ing circle of ideas ; by being tamed. You
went mad about money, because you're an
heiress."

" It's a lie," cried Rosamund furiously.
" I never was mean about money."

" You were worse," said Michael, in a
low voice and yet violently. " You thought
that other people were. You thought every
man who came near you must be a fortune-
hunter ; you would not let yourself go and
be sane ; and now you're mad and I'm mad,
and serve us right."

MAN ALIVE. 85

" You brute!" said Rosamund, quite white.
" And is this true ? "

With an intellectual cruelty of which the
Celt is capable when his abysses are in revolt,
Michael was silent for some seconds, and
then stepped back with an ironical bow.
" Not literally true, of course," he said ;
" only really true. An allegory, shall we
say ? a social satire."

" And I hate and despise your satires,"
cried Rosamund Hunt, letting loose her
whole forcible female personality like a
cyclone, and speaking every word to wound.
" I despise it as I despise your rank tobacco,
and your nasty, loungy ways, and your
snarling, and your Radicalism, and your old
clothes, and your potty little newspaper, and
your rotten failure at everything. I don't
care whether you call it snobbishness or not,
I like life and success, and jolly things to
look at, and action. You won't frighten
me with Diogenes ; I prefer Alexander."

86 MANALIVE.

" Victrix causa de<z — " said Michael
gloomily ; and this angered her more, as, not
knowing what it meant, she imagined it to
be witty.

" Oh, I dare say you know Greek," she
said, with cheerful inaccuracy ; " you haven't
done much with that either." And she crosssed
the garden, pursuing the vanished Innocent
and Mary.

In doing so she passed Inglewood, who
was returning to the house slowly, and with
a thought-clouded brow. He was one of
those men who are quite clever, but quite
the reverse of quick. As he came back out
of the sunset garden into the twilight parlour,
Diana Duke slipped swiftly to her feet and
began putting away the tea things. But it
was not before Inglewood had seen an instan-
taneous picture so unique that he might well
have snapshotted it with his everlasting
camera. For Diana had been sitting in
front of her unfinished work with her chin

MANALIVE. 87

on her hand, looking straight out of the
window in pure thoughtless thought.

" You are busy," said Arthur, oddly em-
barrassed with what he had seen, and
wishing to ignore it.

" There's no time for dreaming in this
world," answered the young lady with her
back to him.

" I have been thinking lately," said Ingle-
wood in a low voice, " that there's no time
for waking up."

She did not reply, and he walked to the
window and looked out on the garden.

" I don't smoke or drink, you know,"' he
said irrelevantly, " because I think they're
drugs. And yet I fancy all hobbies, like my
camera and bicycle, are drugs too. Getting
under a black hood, getting into a dark
room — getting into a hole anyhow. Drug-
ging myself with speed, and sunshine, and
fatigue, and fresh air. Pedalling the machine
so fast that I turn into a machine myself.

88 MANALIVE.

That's the matter with all of us. We're too
busy to wake up."

"Well," said the girl solidly, "what is
there to wake up to ? "

" There must be ! " cried Inglewood, turn-
ing round in a singular excitement — " there
must be something to wake up to ! All
we do is preparations — your cleanliness, and
my healthiness, and Warner's scientific appli-
ances. We're always preparing for some-
thing— something that never comes off. I
ventilate the house, and you sweep the house ;
but what is going to happen in the house ? "

She was looking at him quietly, but with
very bright eyes, and seemed to be searching for
some form of words which she could not find.

Before she could speak the door burst
open, and the boisterous Rosamund Hunt,
in her flamboyant white hat, boa, and parasol,
stood framed in the doorway. She was in a
breathing heat, and on her open face was an
expression of the most infantile astonishment.

MANALIVE. 89

" Well, here's a fine game ! " she said,
panting. " What am I to do now, I wonder ?
I've wired for Dr. Warner ; that's all I can
think of doing."

" What is the matter ? " asked Diana, rather
sharply, but moving forward like one used
to be called upon for assistance.

" It's Mary," said the heiress, " my com-
panion Mary Gray : that cracked friend of
yours called Smith has proposed to her in
the garden, after ten hours' acquaintance, and
he wants to go off with her now for a special
licence."

Arthur Inglewood walked to the open
French windows and looked out on the
garden, still golden with evening light.
Nothing moved there but a bird or two
hopping and twittering ; but beyond the
hedge and railings, in the road outside the
garden gate, a hansom cab was waiting, with
the yellow Gladstone bag on top of it.

Chapter IV.
THE GARDEN OF THE GOD.

£)IANA DUKE seemed inexplicably irri-
tated at the abrupt entrance and
utterance of the other girl.

" Well," she said shortly, " I suppose Miss
Gray can decline him if she doesn't want to
marry him."

" But she does want to marry him ! " cried
Rosamund in exasperation. " She's a wild,
wicked fool, and I won't be parted from
her."

" Perhaps," said Diana icily ; "but I really
don't see what we can do."

" But the man's balmy, Diana," reasoned
her friend angrily. " I can't let my nice
governess marry a man that's balmy ! You

MANALIVE. 91

or somebody must stop it ! — Mr. Inglewood,
you're a man ; go and tell them they simply
can't."

" Unfortunately, it seems to me they simply
can," said Inglewood, with a depressed air.
" I have far less right of intervention than
Miss Duke, besides having, of course, far less
moral force than she."

" You haven't either of you got much,"
cried Rosamund, the last stays of her formi-
dable temper giving way ; " I think I'll go
somewhere else for a little sense and pluck.
I think I know some one who will help me
more than you do, at any rate . . . he's a
cantankerous beast, but he's a man, and has
a mind, and knows it. . . ." And she flung
out into the garden, with cheeks aflame, and
the parasol whirling like a Catherine wheel.

She found Michael Moon standing under
the garden tree, looking over the hedge ;
hunched like a bird of prey, with his large
pipe hanging down his long blue chin.

92 MANALIVE.

The very hardness of his expression pleased
her, after the nonsense of the new engage-
ment and the shilly-shallying of her other
friends.

" I am sorry I was cross, Mr. Moon," she
said frankly. " I hated you for being a cynic ;
but I've been well punished, for I want a
cynic just now. I've had my fill of senti-
ment— I'm fed up with it. The world's
gone mad, Mr. Moon — all except the cynics,
I think. That maniac Smith wants to marry
my old friend Mary, and she — and she —
doesn't seem to mind."

Seeing his attentive face still undisturbedly
smoking, she added smartly, " I'm not
joking ; that's Mr. Smith's cab outside. He
swears he'll take her off now to his aunt's,
and go for a special licence. Do give me
some practical advice, Mr. Moon."

Mr. Moon took his pipe out of his mouth,
held it in his hand for an instant reflectively,
and then tossed it to the other side of the

MANALIVE. 93

garden. " My practical advice to you is
this," he said : " Let him go for his special
licence, and ask him to get another one for
you and me.'*

" Is that one of your jokes ? " asked the
young lady. " Do say what you really mean."

" I mean that Innocent Smith is a man of
business," said Moon with ponderous pre-
cision— " a plain, practical man ; a man of
affairs ; a man of facts and the daylight. He
has let down twenty ton of good building
bricks suddenly on my head, and I am
glad to say they have woken me up. We
went to sleep a little while ago on this very
lawn, in this very sunlight. We have had a
little nap for five years or so, but now we're
going to be married, Rosamund, and I can't
see why that cab. . . ."

" Really," said Rosamund stoutly, " I
don't know what you mean."

" What a lie ! " cried Michael, advancing
on her with brightening eyes. " I'm all for

94 MANALIVE.

lies in an ordinary way ; but don't you see that
to-night they won't do ? We've wandered
into a world of facts, old girl. That grass
growing, and that sun going down, and that
cab at the door, are facts. You used to
torment and excuse yourself by saying I was
after your money, and didn't really love you.
But if I stood here now and told you I didn't
love you — you wouldn't believe me : for
truth is in this garden to-night."

" Really, Mr. Moon . . ." said Rosamund,
rather more faintly.

He kept two big blue magnetic eyes fixed
on her face. " Is my name Moon ? " he
asked. " Is your name Hunt ? On my
honour, they sound to me as quaint and
distant as Red Indian names. It's as if your
name was " Swim " and my name was
" Sunrise." But our real names are Husband
and Wife, as they were when we fell asleep."

" It is no good," said Rosamund, with real
tears in her eyes ; " one can never go back."

MANALIVE. 95

" I can go where I damn please," said
Michael, " and I can carry you on my
shoulder."

" But really, Michael, really, you must
stop and think ! " cried the girl earnestly.
" You could carry me off my feet, I dare say,
soul and body, but it may be bitter bad
business for all that. These things done in
that romantic rush, like Mr. Smith's, they —
they do attract women, I don't deny it. As
you say, we're all telling the truth to-night.
They've attracted poor Mary, for one. They
attract me, Michael. But the cold fact
remains : imprudent marriages do lead to long
unhappiness and disappointment — you've got
used to your drinks and things — I shan't be
pretty much longer — "

" Imprudent marriages ! " roared Michael.
" And pray where in earth or heaven are there
any prudent marriages ? Might as well talk
about prudent suicides. You and I have
dawdled round each other long enough, and

96 MANALIVE.

are we any safer than Smith and Mary Gray,
who met last night ? You never know a
husband till you marry him. Unhappy !
of course you'll be unhappy. Who the
devil are you that you shouldn't be unhappy,
like the mother that bore you ? Disappointed !
of course we'll be disappointed. I, for one,
don't expect till I die to be so good a man
as I am at this minute, for just now I'm fifty
thousand feet high — a tower with all the
trumpets shouting."

" You see all this," said Rosamund, with
a grand sincerity in her solid face, " and do
you really want to marry me ? "

" My darling, what else is there to do ? "
reasoned the Irishman. " What other occu-
pation is there for an active man on this
earth, except to marry you? What's the
alternative to marriage, barring sleep ? It's
not liberty, Rosamund. Unless you marry
God, as our nuns do in Ireland, you must
marry Man — that is Me. The only third

MANALIVE. 97

thing is to marry yourself — to live with
yourself — yourself, yourself, yourself — the
only companion that is never satisfied — and
never satisfactory."

" Michael," said Miss Hunt, in a very
soft voice, " if you won't talk so much, I'll
marry you."

" It's no time for talking," cried Michael
Moon ; " singing is the only thing. Can't
you find that mandoline of yours, Rosamund ? "

" Go and fetch it for me," said Rosamund,
with crisp and sharp authority.

The lounging Mr. Moon stood for one
split second astonished ; then he shot away
across the lawn, as if shod with the feathered
shoes out of the Greek fairy tale. He cleared
three yards and fifteen daisies at a leap, out
of mere bodily levity ; but when he came
within a yard or two of the open parlour
windows, his flying feet fell in their old
manner like lead ; he twisted round and
came back slowly, whistling. The events

98 MANALIVE.

of that enchanted evening were not at an
end.

Inside the dark sitting-room of which
Moon had caught a glimpse a curious thing
had happened, almost an instant after the
intemperate exit of Rosamund. It was some-
thing which, occurring in that obscure
parlour, seemed to Arthur Inglewood like
heaven and earth turning head over heels,
the sea being the ceiling and the stars the
floor. No words can express how it as-
tonished him, as it astonishes all simple
men when it happens. Yet the stiffest
female stoicism seems separated from it only
by a sheet of paper or a sheet of steel. It
indicates no surrender, far less any sympathy.
The most rigid and ruthless woman can
begin to cry, just as the most effeminate
man can grow a beard. It is a separate
sexual power, and proves nothing one way
or the other about force of character. But
to young men ignorant of women, like

MANALIVE. 99

Arthur Inglewood, to see Diana Duke crying
was like seeing a motor-car shedding tears
of petrol.

He could never have given (even if his
really manly modesty had permitted it) any
vaguest vision of what he did when he saw
that portent. He acted as men do when a
theatre catches fire — very differently from
how they would have conceived themselves
as acting, whether for better or worse. He
had a faint memory of certain half-stifled ex-
planations, that the heiress was the one really
paying guest, and she would go, and the
bailiffs (in consequence) would come ; but
after that he knew nothing of his own con-
duct except by the protests it evoked.

" Leave me alone, Mr. Inglewood — leave
me alone ; that's not the way to help."

" But I can help you," said Arthur, with
grinding certainty ; " I can, I can, I can. . . ."

" Why, you said," cried the girl, " that
you were much weaker than me."

ioo MANALIVE.

" So I am weaker than you," said Arthur,
in a voice that went vibrating through every-
thing, " but not just now."

" Let go my hands ! " cried Diana. " I
won't be bullied."

In one element he was much stronger
than she — the matter of humour. This leapt
up in him suddenly, and he laughed, saying :
" Well, you are mean. You know quite
well you'll bully me all the rest of my life.
You might allow a man the one minute of
his life when he's allowed to bully."

It was as extraordinary for him to laugh
as for her to cry, and for the first time since
her childhood Diana was entirely off her
guard.

" Do you mean you want to marry me ? "
she said.

" Why, there's a cab at the door ! " cried
Inglewood, springing up with an unconscious
energy and bursting open the glass doors that
led into the garden.

MANALIVE. 10 1

As he led her out by the hand they
realized somehow for the first time that
the house and garden were on a steep height
over London. And yet, though they felt
the place to be uplifted, they felt it also to
be secret : it was like some round walled
garden on the top of one of the turrets of
heaven.

Inglewood looked around dreamily, his
brown eyes devouring all sorts of details
with a senseless delight. He noticed for
the first time that the railings of the gate
beyond the garden bushes were moulded
like little spearheads and painted blue. He
noticed that one of the blue spears was
loosened in its place, and hung sideways ;
and this almost made him laugh. He
thought it somehow exquisitely harmless
and funny that the railing should be crooked;
he thought he should like to know how it
happened, who did it, and how the man
was getting on.

102 MANALIVE.

When they were gone a few feet across
that fiery grass they realized that they were
not alone. Rosamund Hunt and the eccentric
Mr. Moon, both of whom they had last seen
in the blackest temper of detachment, were
standing together on the lawn. They were
standing in quite an ordinary manner, and
yet they looked somehow like people in a
book.

" Oh," said Diana, " what lovely air ! "

" I know," called out Rosamund, with a
pleasure so positive that it rang out like a
complaint. " It's just like that horrid,
beastly, fizzy stuff they gave me that made
me feel happy."

" Oh, it isn't like anything but itself ! "
answered Diana, breathing deeply. " Why,
it's all cold, and yet it feels like fire."

" Balmy is the word we use in Fleet
Street," said Mr. Moon. " Balmy — especi-
ally on the crumpet." And he fanned him-
self quite unnecessarily with his straw hat.

MANALIVE. 103

They were all full of little leaps and pulsa-
tions of objectless and airy energy. Diana
stirred and stretched her long arms rigidly,
as if crucified, in a sort of excruciating
restfulness ; Michael stood still for long
intervals, with gathered muscles, then spun
round like a teetotum, and stood still again ;
Rosamund did not trip, for women never
trip, except when they fall on their noses,
but she struck the ground with her foot as
she moved, as if to some inaudible dance
tune ; and Inglewood, leaning quite quietly
against a tree, had unconsciously clutched
a branch and shaken it with a creative
violence. Those giant gestures of Man, that
make the high statues and the strokes of war,
tossed and tormented all their limbs. Silently
as they strolled and stood they were bursting
like batteries with an animal magnetism.

" And now," cried Moon quite suddenly,
stretching out a hand on each side, " let's
dance round that bush ! "

104 MANALIVE.

" Why, what bush do you mean ? " asked
Rosamund, looking round with a sort of
radiant rudeness.

"The bush that isn't there," said Michael
— " the Mulberry Bush."

They had taken each other's hands, half
laughing and quite ritually ; and before they
could disconnect again Michael spun them
all round, like a demon spinning the world
for a top. Diana felt, as the circle of the
horizon flew instantaneously around her, a
far aerial sense of the ring of heights beyond
London and corners where she had climbed
as a child ; she seemed almost to hear the
rooks cawing about the old pines on High-
gate, or to see the glowworms gathering
and kindling in the woods of Box Hill.

The circle broke — as all such perfect
circles of levity must break — and sent its
author, Michael, flying, as by centrifugal
force, far away against the blue rails of
the gate. When reeling there he suddenly

MANALIVE. 105

raised shout after shout of a new and quite
dramatic character.

" Why, it's Warner ! " he shouted, waving
his arms. " It's jolly old Warner — with a
new silk hat and the old silk moustache ! "

" Is that Dr. Warner ? " cried Rosamund,
bounding forward in a burst of memory,
amusement, and distress. " Oh, I'm so
sorry ! Oh, do tell him it's all right ! *

" Let's take hands and tell him," said
Michael Moon. For indeed, while they
were talking, another hansom had dashed
up behind the one already waiting, and
Dr. Herbert Warner, leaving a companion
in the cab, had carefully deposited himself
on the pavement.

Now, when you are an eminent physician
and are wired for by an heiress to come to
a case of dangerous mania, and when, as
you come in through the garden to the
house, the heiress and her landlady and
two of the gentlemen boarders join hands

4a

106 MANALIVE.

and dance round you in a ring, calling out,
" It's all right ! it's all right ! " you are apt
to be flustered and even displeased. Dr.
Warner was a placid but hardly a placable
person. The two things are by no means
the same ; and even when Moon explained
to him that he, Warner, with his high hat
and tall, solid figure, was just such a classic
column as ought to be danced round by a
ring of laughing maidens on some old golden
Greek seashore — even then he seemed to
miss the point of the general rejoicing.

" Inglewood ! " cried Dr. Warner, fixing
his former disciple with a stare, " are you
mad ? "

Arthur flushed to the roots of his brown
hair, but he answered, easily and quietly
enough, " Not now. The truth is, Warner,
I've just made a rather important medical
discovery — quite in your line."

" What do you mean ? " asked the great
doctor stiffly — " what discovery ? "

MANALIVE. 107

" Fve discovered that health really is
catching, like disease," answered Arthur.

" Yes ; sanity has broken out, and is
spreading," said Michael, performing a pas
seul with a thoughtful expression. " Twenty
thousand more cases taken to the hospitals ;
nurses employed night and day."

Dr. Warner studied Michael's grave face
and lightly moving legs with an unfathomed
wonder. " And is this, may I ask," he said,
" the sanity that is spreading ? "

" You must forgive me, Dr. Warner,"
cried Rosamund Hunt heartily. " I know
I've treated you badly ; but indeed it was
all a mistake. I was in a frightfully bad
temper when I sent for you, but now it
all seems like a dream — and — and Mr.
Smith is the sweetest, most sensible, most
delightful old thing that ever existed, and
he may marry any one he likes — except me."

" I should suggest Mrs. Duke," said
Michael.

io8 MANALIVE.

The gravity of Dr. Warner's face in-
creased. He took a slip of pink paper from
his waistcoat pocket, with his pale blue eyes
quietly fixed on Rosamund's face all the time.
He spoke with a not inexcusable frigidity.

"Really, Miss Hunt," he said, "you are
not yet very reassuring. You sent me this
wire only half an hour ago : ' Come at once,
if possible, with another doctor. Man —
Innocent Smith — gone mad on premises, and
doing dreadful things. Do you know any-
thing of him ? ' I went round at once to
a distinguished colleague of mine, a doctor
who is also a private detective and an
authority on criminal lunacy ; he has come
round with me, and is waiting in the cab.
Now you calmly tell me that this criminal
madman is a highly sweet and sane old
thing, with accompaniments that set me
speculating on your own definitions of sanity.
I hardly comprehend the change."

" Oh, how can one explain a change in

MANALIVE. 109

sun and moon and everybody's soul ? " cried
Rosamund, in despair. " Must I confess we
had got so morbid as to think him mad
merely because he wanted to get married ;
and that we didn't even know it was only
because we wanted to get married ourselves ?
We'll humiliate ourselves, if you like, doctor;
we're happy enough."

"Where is Mr. Smith?" asked Warner
of Inglewood very sharply.

Arthur started ; he had forgotten all about
the central figure of their farce, who had
not been visible for an hour or more.

" I — I think he's on the other side of the
house, by the dustbin," he said.

" He may be on the road to Russia/' said
Warner ; " but he must be found." And he
strode away and disappeared round a corner
of the house by the sunflowers.

" I hope," said Rosamund, " he won't
really interfere with Mr. Smith."

" Interfere with the daisies ! " said Michael

no MANAL1VE.

with a snort. " A man can't be locked up
for falling in love — at least I hope not."

" No ; I think even a doctor couldn't
make a disease out of him. He'd throw off
the doctor like the disease, don't you know ?
I believe it's a case of a sort of holy well.
I believe Innocent Smith is simply innocent,
and that is why he is so extraordinary."

It was Rosamund who spoke, restlessly
tracing circles in the grass with the point
of her white shoe.

" I think," said Inglewood, " that Smith
is not extraordinary at all. He's comic just
because he's so startlingly commonplace.
Don't you know what it is to be in all one
family circle, with aunts and uncles, when
a schoolboy comes home for the holidays?
That bag there on the cab is only a school-
boy's hamper. This tree here in the garden
is only the sort of tree that any schoolboy
would have climbed. Yes, that's the thing
that has haunted us all about him, the thing

MANALIVE. 1 1 1

we could never fit a word to. Whether he
is my old schoolfellow or no, at least he is
all my old schoolfellows. He is the endless
bun -eating, ball -throwing animal that we
have all been."

" That is only you absurd boys," said
Diana. " I don't believe any girl was ever
so silly, and I'm sure no girl was ever so
happy, except — " and she stopped.

" I will tell you the truth about Innocent
Smith," said Michael Moon in a low voice.
" Dr. Warner has gone to look for him in
vain. He is not there. Haven't you
noticed that we never saw him since we
found ourselves ? He was an astral baby
born of all four of us ; he was only our own
youth returned. Long before poor old
Warner had clambered out of his cab, the
thing we called Smith had dissolved into
dew and light on this lawn. Once or twice
more, by the mercy of God, we may feel
the thing, but the man we shall never see.

ii2 MANALIVE.

In a spring garden before breakfast we shall
smell the smell called Smith. In the snap-
ping of brisk twigs in tiny fires we shall hear
a noise named Smith. Everything insatiable
and innocent in the grasses that gobble up
the earth like babies at a bun feast, in the
white mornings that split the sky as a boy
splits up white firwood, we may feel for one
instant the presence of an impetuous purity ;
but his innocence was too close to the un-
consciousness of inanimate things not to
melt back at a mere touch into the mild
hedges and heavens ; he — "

He was interrupted from behind the house
by a bang like that of a bomb. Almost at
the same instant the stranger in the cab
sprang out of it, leaving it rocking upon the
stones of the road. He clutched the blue
railings of the garden, and peered eagerly
over them in the direction of the noise. He
was a small, loose, yet alert man, very thin,
with a face that seemed made out of fish

M ANALIVE. 1 1 3

bones, and a silk hat quite as rigid and
resplendent as Warner's, but thrust back
recklessly on the hinder part of his head.

" Murder ! " he shrieked, in a high and
feminine but very penetrating voice. " Stop
that murderer there ! "

Even as he shrieked a second shot shook
the lower windows of the house, and with
the noise of it Dr. Herbert Warner came
flying round the corner like a leaping rabbit.
Yet before he had reached the group a third
discharge had deafened them, and they saw
with their own eyes two spots of white sky
drilled through the second of the unhappy
Herbert's high hats. The next moment the
fugitive physician fell over a flowerpot, and
came down on all fours, staring like a cow.
The hat with the two shot-holes in it rolled
upon the gravel path before him, and
Innocent Smith came round the corner like
a railway train. He was looking twice his
proper size — a giant clad in green, the big

ii4 MANALIVE.

revolver still smoking in his hand, his face
sanguine and in shadow, his eyes blazing like
stars, and his yellow hair standing out all
ways like Struwelpeter's.

Though this startling scene hung but an
instant in stillness, Inglewood had time to
feel once more what he had felt when he
saw the other lovers standing on the lawn —
the sensation of a certain cut and coloured
clearness that belongs rather to the things of
art than to the things of experience. The
broken flowerpot with its red-hot geraniums,
the green bulk of Smith and the black bulk
of Warner, the blue-spiked railings behind,
clutched by the stranger's yellow vulture
claws and peered over by his long vulture
neck, the silk hat on the gravel, and the
little cloudlet of smoke floating across the
garden as innocently as the puff of a ciga-
rette— all these seemed unnaturally distinct
and definite. They existed, like symbols, in
an ecstasy of separation. Indeed, every

MANALIVE. (ij[

object grew more and more particular and
precious because the whole picture was
breaking up. Things look so bright just
before they burst.

Long before his fancies had begun, let
alone ceased, Arthur had stepped across and
taken one of Smith's arms. Simultaneously
the little stranger had run up the steps and
taken the other. Smith went into peals of
laughter, and surrendered his pistol with
perfect willingness. Moon raised the doctor
to his feet, and then went and leaned sullenly
on the garden gate. The girls were quiet
and vigilant, as good women mostly are
in instants of catastrophe, but their faces
showed that, somehow or other, a light had
been dashed out of their sky. The doctor
himself, when he had risen, collected his hat
and wits, and dusting himself down with an
air of great disgust, turned to them in brief
apology. He was very white with his recent
panic, but he spoke with perfect self-control.

n6 MANALIVE.

" You will excuse us, ladies," he said; " my
friend and Mr. Inglewood are both scientists
in their several ways. I think we had better
all take Mr. Smith indoors, and communicate
with you later."

And under the guard of the three natural
philosophers the disarmed Smith was led
tactfully into the house, still roaring with
laughter.

From time to time during the next
twenty minutes his distant boom of mirth
could again be heard through the half-open
window ; but there came no echo of the
quiet voices of the physicians. The girls
walked about the garden together, rubbing
up each other's spirits as best they might ;
Michael Moon still hung heavily against the
gate. Somewhere about the expiration of
that time Dr. Warner came out of the house
again with a face less pale but even more
stern, and the little man with the fish-bone
face advanced gravely in his rear. And if

MANALIVE. 117

the face of Warner in the sunlight was that
of a hanging judge, the face of the little
man behind was more like a death's-head.

" Miss Hunt," said Dr. Herbert Warner,
"I only wish to offer you my warm thanks
and admiration. By your prompt courage
and wisdom in sending for us by wire this
evening, you have enabled us to capture and
put out of mischief one of the most cruel
and terrible of the enemies of humanity — a
criminal whose plausibility and pitilessness
have never been before combined in flesh."

Rosamund looked across at him with a
white, blank face and blinking eyes. " What
do you mean ? " she asked. " You can't
mean Mr. Smith ? "

"He has gone by many other names,"
said the doctor gravely, " and not one he
did not leave to be cursed behind him.
That man, Miss Hunt, has left a track of
blood and tears across the world. Whether
he is mad as well as wicked, we are trying,

1 1 8 MANALIVE.

in the interests of science, to discover. In
any case, we shall have to take him before a
magistrate first, even if only on the road to a
lunatic asylum. But the lunatic asylum in
which he is confined will have to be sealed
with wall within wall, and ringed with guns
like a fortress, or he will break out again to
bring forth carnage and darkness on the
earth."

Rosamund looked at the two doctors, her
face growing paler and paler. Then her eyes
strayed to Michael, who was leaning on the
gate ; but he continued to lean on it without
moving, with his face turned away towards
the darkening road.

Chapter V.
THE ALLEGORICAL PRACTICAL JOKER.

HPHE criminal specialist who had come
with Dr. Warner was a somewhat more
urbane and even dapper figure on closer
inspection than he had appeared when
clutching the railings and craning his neck
into the garden. He even looked compara-
tively young when he took his hat off, having
fair hair parted in the middle and carefully
curled on each side, and lively movements,
especially of the hands. He had a dandified
monocle slung round his neck by a broad
black ribbon, and a big bow tie, as if a big
American moth had alighted on him. His
dress and gestures were bright enough for a
boy's ; it was only when you looked at the

120 MANALIVE.

fish-bone face itself that you beheld some-
thing acrid and old. His manners were
excellent, though hardly English, and he had
two half-conscious tricks by which people
who only met him once remembered him.
One was a trick of closing his eyes when he
wished to be particularly polite ; the other
was one of lifting his joined thumb and
forefinger in the air as if holding a pinch of
snuff, when he was hesitating or hovering
over a word. But those who were longer in
his company tended to forget these oddities
in the stream of his quaint and solemn con-
versation and really singular views.

" Miss Hunt," said Dr. Warner, " this is
Dr. Cyrus Pym."

Dr. Cyrus Pym shut his eyes during the
introduction, rather as if he were " playing
fair " in some child's game, and gave a
prompt little bow which somehow suddenly
revealed him as a citizen of the United
States.

MANALIVE. 121

" Dr. Cyrus Pym," continued Warner
(Dr. Pym shut his eyes again), "is perhaps
the first criminological expert of America.
We are very fortunate to be able to consult
with him in this extraordinary case — "

" I can't make head or tail of anything,"
said Rosamund. " How can poor Mr.
Smith be so dreadful as he is by your
account ? "

" Or by your telegram," said Herbert
Warner, smiling.

" Oh, you don't understand," cried the girl
impatiently. " Why, he's done us all more
good than going to church."

" I think I can explain to the young
lady," said Dr. Cyrus Pym. "This criminal
or maniac Smith is a very genius of evil, and
has a method of his own, a method of the
most daring ingenuity. He is popular
wherever he goes, for he invades every
house as an uproarious child. People are
getting suspicious of all the respectable

122 MANALIVE.

disguises for a scoundrel ; so he always uses
the disguise of — what shall I say — the
Bohemian, the blameless Bohemian. He
always carries people off their feet. People
are used to the mask of conventional good
conduct. He goes in for eccentric good-
nature. You expect a Don Juan to dress up
as a solemn and solid Spanish merchant ;
but you're not prepared for Don Juan when
he dresses up as Don Quixote. You expect
a humbug to behave like Sir Charles
Grandison ; because (with all respect, Miss
Hunt, for the deep, tear-moving tenderness
of Samuel Richardson) Sir Charles Grandison
so often behaved like a humbug. But no
real red-blooded citizen is quite ready for a
humbug that models himself not on Sir
Charles Grandison but on Sir Roger de
Coverley. Setting up to be a good man a
little cracked is a new criminal incognito,
Miss Hunt. It's been a great notion, and
commonly successful ; but its success just

MANALIVE. 123

makes it mighty cruel. I can forgive Dick
Turpin if he impersonates Dr. Busby ; I
can't forgive him when he impersonates
Dr. Johnson. The saint with a tile loose
is a bit too sacred, I guess, to be parodied."

" But how do you know," cried Rosamund
desperately, " that Mr. Smith is a known
criminal ? "

" I collated all the documents," said the
American, "when my friend Warner knocked
me up on receipt of your cable. It is my pro-
fessional affair to know these facts, Miss Hunt ;
and there's no more doubt about them than
about the Bradshaw down at the depot. This
man has hitherto escaped the law, through his
admirable affectations of infancy or insanity.
But I myself, as a specialist, have privately
authenticated notes of some eighteen or
twenty crimes attempted or achieved in
this manner. He comes to houses as he
has to this, and gets a grand popularity. He
makes things go. They do go ; when he's

124 MANALIVE.

gone the things are gone. Gone, Miss Hunt,
gone, a man's life or a man's spoons, or more
often a woman. I assure you I have all the
memoranda."

" I have seen them," said Warner solidly.
" I can assure you this is all correct."

" The most unmanly aspect, according to
my feelings," went on the American doctor,
" is this perpetual deception of innocent
women by a wild simulation of innocence.
From almost every house where this great
imaginative devil has been, he has taken some
poor girl away with him ; some say he's got a
hypnotic eye with his other queer features,
and that they go like automata. What's
become of all those poor girls nobody knows.
Murdered, I dare say ; for we've lots of
instances, besides this one, of his turning his
hand to murder, though none ever brought
him under the law. Anyhow, our most
modern methods of research can't find any
trace of the wretched women. It's when I

MANALIVE. 125

think of them that I am real moved, Miss
Hunt. And I've really nothing else to say
just now except what Dr. Warner has said."

" Quite so," said Warner, with a smile
that seemed moulded in marble — " that we
all have to thank you very much for that
telegram."

The little Yankee scientist had been
speaking with such evident sincerity that
one forgot the tricks of his voice and
manner — the falling eyelids, the rising in-
tonation, and the poised ringer and thumb —
which were at other times a little comic.
It was not so much that he was cleverer than
Warner ; perhaps he was not so clever, though
he was more celebrated. But he had what
Warner never had, a fresh and unaffected
seriousness — the great American virtue of
simplicity. Rosamund knitted her brows
and looked gloomily towards the darkening
house that contained the dark prodigy.

Broad daylight still endured ; but it had

126 MANALIVE.

already changed from gold to silver, and was
changing from silver to gray. The long
plumy shadows of the one or two trees in
the garden faded more and more upon a
dead background of dusk. In the sharpest
and deepest shadow, which was the entrance
to the house by the the big French windows,
Rosamund could watch a hurried consultation
between Inglewood (who was still left in
charge of the mysterious captive) and Diana,
who had moved to his assistance from with-
out. After a few sentences and gestures they
went inside, shutting the glass doors upon
the garden ; and the garden seemed to grow
grayer still.

The American gentleman named Pym
seemed to be turning and on the move
in the same direction ; but before he started
he spoke to Rosamund with a flash of that
guileless tact which redeemed much of his
childish vanity, and with something of
that spontaneous poetry which made it

MANALIVE. 127

difficult, pedantic as he was, to call him a
pedant.

" I'm vurry sorry, Miss Hunt," he said ;
" but Dr. Warner and I, as two quali-^^/
practitioners, had better take Mr. Smith
away in that cab, and the less said about
it the better. Don't you agitate yourself,
Miss Hunt. You've just got to think that
we're taking away a monstrosity, something
that oughtn't to be at all — something like
one of those gods in your Britannic Museum,
all wings, and beards, and legs, and eyes, and
no shape. That's what Smith is, and you
shall soon be quit of him."

He had already taken a step towards the
house, and Warner was about to follow him,
when the glass doors were opened again and
Diana Duke came out with more than her
usual quickness across the lawn. Her face
was aquiver with worry and excitement, and
her dark earnest eyes fixed only on the other
girl.

128 MANALIVE.

" Rosamund," she cried in despair, " what
shall I do with her ? "

"With her?" cried Miss Hunt, with a
violent jump. " O lord, he isn't a woman
too, is he ? "

" No, no, no," said Dr. Pym soothingly,
as if in common fairness. " A woman ? no,
really, he is not so bad as that."

" I mean your friend Mary Gray," retorted
Diana with equal tartness. " What on earth
am I to do with her ? "

" How can we tell her about Smith, you
mean," answered Rosamund, her face at once
clouding and softening. " Yes, it will be
pretty painful."

" But I have told her," exploded Diana,
with more than her congenital exasperation.
" I have told her, and she doesn't seem to
mind. She still says she's going away with
Smith in that cab."

" But it's impossible ! " ejaculated Rosamund.
"Why, Mary is really religious. She — "

MANAL1VE. 129

She stopped in time to realize that Mary
Gray was comparatively close to her on the
lawn. Her quiet companion had come down
very quietly into the garden, but dressed very
decisively for travel. She had a neat but very
ancient blue-gray tam-o'-shanter on her head,
and was pulling some rather threadbare gray
gloves on to her hands. Yet the two tints
fitted excellently with her heavy copper-
coloured hair ; the more excellently for the
touch of shabbiness : for a woman's clothes
never suit her so well as when they seem to
suit her by accident.

But in this case the woman had a quality
yet more unique and attractive. In such
gray hours, when the sun is sunk and the
skies are already sad, it will often happen
that one reflection at some occasional angle
will cause to linger the last of the light. A
scrap of window, a scrap of water, a scrap
of looking-glass, will be full of the fire that

is lost to all the rest of the earth. The
5

130 MANALIVE.

quaint, almost triangular face of Mary Gray
was like some triangular piece of mirror that
could still repeat the splendour of hours before.
Mary, though she was always graceful, could
never have properly been called beautiful ;
and yet her happiness amid all that misery
was so beautiful as to make a man catch his
breath.

" O Diana," cried Rosamund in a lower
voice and altering her phrase; "but how did
you tell her ? "

" It is quite easy to tell her," answered
Diana sombrely ; " it makes no impression
at all."

" I'm afraid I've kept everything waiting,"
said Mary Gray apologetically, " and now we
must really say good-bye. Innocent is taking
me to his aunt's over at Hampstead, and I'm
afraid she goes to bed early."

Her words were quite casual and practical,
but there was a sort of sleepy light in her
eyes that was more baffling than darkness ;

MANALIVE. 131

she was like one speaking absently with her
eye on some very distant object.

" Mary, Mary," cried Rosamund, almost
breaking down, " I'm so sorry about it,
but the thing can't be at .all. We — we
have found out all about Mr. Smith."

" All ? " repeated Mary, with a low and
curious intonation ; " why, that must be
awfully exciting."

There was no noise for an instant and
no motion except that the silent Michael
Moon, leaning on the gate, lifted his head,
as it might be to listen. Then Rosamund
remaining speechless, Dr. Pym came to her
rescue in his definite way.

" To begin with," he said, " this man
Smith is constantly attempting murder.
The Warden of Brakespeare College — "

" I know," said Mary, with a vague but
radiant smile ; " Innocent told me."

" I can't say what he told you," replied
Pym quickly, " but I'm very much afraid

1 32 MAN ALIVE.

it wasn't true. The plain truth is that the
man's stained with every known human
crime. I assure you I have all the docu-
ments. I have evidence of his committing
burglary, signed by a most eminent English
curate. I have — "

" Oh, but there were two curates," cried
Mary, with a certain gentle eagerness ; " that
was what made it so much funnier."

The darkened glass doors of the house
opened once more, and Inglewood appeared
for an instant, making a sort of signal. The
American doctor bowed, the English doctor
did not, but they both set out stolidly towards
the house. No one else moved, not even
Michael hanging on the gate ; but the back
of his head and shoulders had still an in-
describable indication that he was listening
to every word.

" But don't you understand, Mary," cried
Rosamund in despair ; " don't you know that
awful things have happened even before our

MANALIVE. 133

very eyes. I should have thought you would
have heard the revolver shots upstairs."

"Yes, I heard the shots," said Mary almost

brightly ; "but I was busy packing just then.

' And Innocent had told me he was going to

shoot at Dr. Warner ; so it wasn't worth

while to come down."

" Oh, I don't understand what you mean,"
cried Rosamund Hunt, stamping, " but you
must and shall understand what I mean. I
don't care how cruelly I put it, if only I can
save you. I mean that your Innocent Smith
is the most awfully wicked man in the world.
He has sent bullets at lots of other men and
gone off in cabs with lots of other women.
And he seems to have killed the women too,
for nobody can find them."

" He is really rather naughty sometimes,"
said Mary Gray, laughing softly as she
buttoned her old gray gloves.

" Oh, this is really mesmerism, or some-
thing," said Rosamund, and burst into tears.

1 34 M ANALIVE.

At the same moment the two black-clad
doctors appeared out of the house with their
great green-clad captive between them. He
made no resistance, but was still laughing
in a groggy and half-witted style. Arthur
Inglewood followed in the rear, a dark and
red study in the last shades of distress and
shame. In this black, funereal, and painfully
realistic style the exit from Beacon House
was made by the man whose entrance a day
before had been effected by the happy leap-
ing of a wall and the hilarious climbing of
a tree. No one moved of the groups in
the garden except Mary Gray, who stepped
forward quite naturally, calling out, " Are
you ready, Innocent ? Our cab's been wait-
ing such a long time."

" Ladies and gentlemen," said Dr. Warner
firmly, " I must insist on asking this lady to
stand aside. We shall have trouble enough
as it is, with the three of us in a cab."

" But it is our cab," persisted Mary.

MANALIVE. 135

" Why, there's Innocent's yellow bag on
the top of it."

" Stand aside," repeated Warner roughly.
''And you, Mr. Moon, please be so obliging
as to move a moment. Come, come ! the
sooner this ugly business is over the better
— and how can we open the gate if you
will keep leaning on it ? "

Michael Moon looked at his long lean
forefinger, and seemed to consider and re-
consider this argument. " Yes," he said at
last ; " but how can I lean on this gate if
you keep on opening it ? "

" Oh, get out of the way ! " cried Warner,
almost good-humouredly. "You can lean on
the gate any time."

" No," said Moon reflectively. " Seldom
the time and the place and the blue gate alto-
gether ; and it all depends whether you come
of an old country family. My ancestors
leaned on gates before any one had discovered
how to open them."

1 36 MANALIVE.

" Michael ! " cried Arthur Inglewood in a
kind of agony, " are you going to get out cf
the way ? "

" Why, no ; I think not," said Michael,
after some meditation, and swung himself
slowly round, so that he confronted the
company, while still, in a lounging attitude,
occupying the path.

" Hullo ! " he called out suddenly ; "what
are you doing to Mr. Smith ? "

" Taking him away," answered Warner
shortly, " to be examined."

" Matriculation ? " asked Moon brightly.

" By a magistrate," said the other curtly.

" And what other magistrate," cried
Michael, raising his voice, " dares to try
what befell on this free soil, save only the
ancient and independent Dukes of Beacon ?
What other court dares to try one of our
company, save only the High Court of
Beacon ? Have you forgotten that only
this afternoon we flew the flag of indepen-

MANALIVE. 137

dence and severed ourselves from all the
nations of the earth ? "

" Michael," cried Rosamund, wringing
her hands, " how can you stand there talking
nonsense ? Why, you saw the dreadful thing
yourself. You were there when he went
mad. It was you that helped the doctor
up when he fell over the flower-pot."

"And the High Court of Beacon," replied
Moon with hauteur, " has special powers in
all cases concerning lunatics, flower-pots, and
doctors who fall down in gardens. It's in
our very first charter from Edward I. : 'Si
medicus quisquam in horto prostratus — ' "

" Out of the way ! " cried Warner with
sudden fury, " or we will force you out
of it."

" What ! " cried Michael Moon, with a
cry of hilarious fierceness. " Shall I die in
defence of this sacred pale ? Will you paint
these blue railings red with my gore ? " and
he laid hold of one of the blue spikes behind

5a

138 MANALIVE.

him. As Arthur Inglewood had noticed
earlier in the evening, the railing was loose
and crooked at this place, and the painted
iron staff and spearhead came away in
Michael's hand as he shook it.

" See ! " he cried, brandishing this broken
javelin in the air, " the very lances round
Beacon Tower leap from their places to
defend it. Ah, in such a place and hour
it is a fine thing to die alone ! " And in
a voice like a drum he rolled the noble lines
of Ronsard —

" Ou pour 1'honneur de Dieu, ou pour le droit de mon

prince,
Navre, poitrine ouverte, au bord de mon province."

" Sakes alive ! " said the American gentle-
man, almost in an awed tone. Then he
added, " Are there two maniacs here ? "

" No ; there are five," thundered Moon.
"Smith and I are the only sane people left."

" Michael ! " cried Rosamund ; " Michael,
what does it mean ? "

MANALIVE. 139

" It means bosh ! " roared Michael, and
slung his painted spear hurtling to the other
end of the garden. " It means that doctors
are bosh, and criminology is bosh, and
Americans are bosh — much more bosh than
our Court of Beacon. It means, you fat-
heads, that Innocent Smith is no more mad
or bad than the bird on that tree."

" But, my dear Moon," began Inglewood
in his modest manner, " these gentlemen — "

" On the word of two doctors," exploded
Moon again, without listening to anybody
else, " shut up in a private hell on the word
of two doctors ! And such doctors ! Oh,
my hat ! Look at 'em ! — do just look at
'em ! Would you read a book, or buy a
dog, or go to a hotel on the advice of twenty
such ? My people came from Ireland, and
were Catholics. What would you say if
I called a man wicked on the word of two
priests ? "

" But it isn't only their word, Michael,"

MANALIVE.

reasoned Rosamund ; " they've got evidence
too."

" Have you looked at it ? " asked Moon.

" No," said Rosamund, with a sort of
faint surprise ; " these gentlemen are in
charge of it."

" And of everything else, it seems to
me," said Michael. " Why, you haven't
even had the decency to consult Mrs.
Duke."

" Oh, that's no use," said Diana in an
undertone to Rosamund ; " Auntie couldn't
say ' Bo ! ' to a goose."

"I am glad to hear it," answered Michael,
" for with such a flock of geese to say it
to, the horrid expletive might be constantly
on her lips. For my part, I simply refuse
to let things be done in this light and airy
style. I appeal to Mrs. Duke — it's her
house."

" Mrs. Duke ? " repeated Inglewood doubt-
fully.

MANALIVE. 141

" Yes, Mrs. Duke," said Michael firmly,
" commonly called the Iron Duke."

" If you ask Auntie," said Diana quietly,
" she'll only be for doing nothing at all.
Her only idea is to hush things up or to
let things slide. That just suits her."

" Yes," replied Michael Moon ; " and, as
it happens, it just suits all of us. You are
impatient with your elders, Miss Duke ;
but when you are as old yourself you will
know what Napoleon knew — that half one's
letters answer themselves if you can only
refrain from the fleshly appetite of answer-
ing them."

He was still lounging in the same absurd
attitude, with his elbow on the gate, but
his voice had altered abruptly for the third
time ; just as it had changed from the mock
heroic to the humanly indignant, it now
changed to the airy incisiveness of a lawyer
giving good legal advice.

"It isn't only your aunt who wants to

142 MANALIVE.

keep this quiet if she can," he said ; " we
all want to keep it quiet if we can. Look
at the large facts — the big bones of the
case. I believe these scientific gentlemen
have made a highly scientific mistake. I
believe Smith is as blameless as a buttercup.
I admit buttercups don't often let off loaded
pistols in private houses ; I admit there is
something demanding explanation. But I
am morally certain there's some blunder, or
some joke, or some allegory, or some acci-
dent behind all this. Well, suppose I'm
wrong. We've disarmed him ; we're five
men to hold him ; he may as well go to
a lock-up later on as now. But suppose
there's even a chance of my being right.
Is it anybody's interest here to wash this
linen in public ? "

" Come, I'll take each of you in order.
Once take Smith outside that gate, and you
take him into the front page of the evening
papers. I know ; I've written the front

MANALIVE. 143

page myself. Miss Duke, do you or your
aunt want a sort of notice stuck up over
your boarding-house — ' Doctors shot here ' ?
No, no — doctors are rubbish, as I said ; but
you don't want the rubbish shot here.
Arthur, suppose I am right, or suppose I
am wrong. Smith has appeared as an old
schoolfellow of yours. Mark my words, if
he's proved guilty, the Organs of Public
Opinion will say you introduced him. If
he's proved innocent, they will say you
helped to collar him. Rosamund, my dear,
suppose I am right or wrong. If he's proved
guilty, they'll say you engaged your com-
panion to him. If he's proved innocent,
they'll print that telegram. I know the
Organs, damn them."

He stopped an instant ; for this rapid
rationalism left him more breathless than
had either his theatrical or his real denun-
ciation. But he was plainly in earnest, as
well as positive and lucid ; as was proved

144 MANALIVE.

by his proceeding quickly the moment he
had found his breath.

" It is just the same," he cried, " with
our medical friends. You will say that
Dr. Warner has a grievance. I agree.
But does he want specially to be snap-
shotted by all the journalists prostratus in
horto? It was no fault of his, but the
scene was not very dignified even for him.
He must have justice ; but does he want to
ask for justice, not only on his knees but on
his hands and knees ? Does he want to enter
the court of justice on all fours? Doctors
are not allowed to advertise ; and I'm sure no
doctor wants to advertise himself as looking
like that. And even for our American guest
the interest is the same. Let us suppose that
he has conclusive documents. Let as assume
that he has revelations really worth reading.
Well, in a legal inquiry (or a medical inquiry,
for that matter) ten to one he won't be allowed
to read them. He'll be tripped up every two

MANALIVE. 145

or three minutes with some tangle of old
rules. A man can't tell the truth in public
nowadays. But he can still tell it in private ;
he can tell it inside that house."

" It is quite true," said Dr. Cyrus Pym,
who had listened throughout the speech with
a seriousness which only an American could
have retained through such a scene. " It is
quite true that I have been per-ceptibly less
hampered in private inquiries."

" Dr. Pym ! " cried Warner in a sort of
sudden anger. "Dr. Pym ! you aren't surely
going to admit — "

" Smith may be mad," went on the melan-
choly Moon in a monologue that seemed as
heavy as a hatchet, " but there was some-
thing after all in what he said about Home
Rule for every home. Yes, there is some-
thing, when all's said and done, in the High
Court of Beacon. It is really true that human
beings might often get some sort of domestic
justice where just now they can only get legal

146 MANALIVE.

injustice — oh, I am a lawyer too, and I know
that as well. It is true that there's too much
official and indirect power. Often and often
the thing a whole nation can't settle is just
the thing a family could settle. Scores of
young criminals have been fined and sent to
jail when they ought to have been thrashed
and sent to bed. Scores of men, I am sure,
have had a lifetime at Hanwell when they
only wanted a week at Brighton. There is
something in Smith's notion of domestic self-
government ; and I propose that we put it
in practice. You have the prisoner ; you have
the documents. Come, we are a company
of free, white, Christian people, such as
might be besieged in a town or cast up on
a desert island. Let us do this thing our-
selves. Let us go into that house there
and sit down and find out with our own
eyes and ears whether this thing is true or
not ; whether this Smith is a man or a
monster. If we can't do a little thing like

xMANALIVE. 147

that, what right have we to put crosses on
ballot papers ? "

Inglewood and Pym exchanged a glance ;
and Warner, who was no fool, saw in that
glance that Moon was gaining ground. The
motives that led Arthur to think of surrender
were indeed very different from those which
affected Dr. Cyrus Pym. All Arthur's in-
stincts were on the side of privacy and a
polite settlement ; he was very English and
would often endure wrongs rather than right
them by scenes and serious rhetoric. To
play at once the buffoon and the knight-
errant, like his Irish friend, would have
been absolute torture to him ; but even
the semi-official part he had played that
afternoon was very painful. He was not
likely to be reluctant if any one could con-
vince him that his duty was to let sleeping
dogs lie.

On the other hand, Cyrus Pym belonged
to a country in which things are possible

148 MANALIVE.

that seem crazy to the English. Regu-
lations and authorities exactly like one of
Innocent's pranks or one of Michael's satires
really exist, propped by placid policemen and
imposed on bustling business men. Pym
knew whole States which are vast and yet
secret and fanciful ; each is as big as a
nation yet as private as a lost village, and
as unexpected as an apple-pie bed. States
where no man may have a cigarette, States
where any man may have ten wives, very
strict prohibition States, very lax divorce
States — all these large local vagaries had
prepared Cyrus Pym's mind for small local
vagaries in a smaller country. Infinitely
more remote from England than any Russian
or Italian, utterly incapable even of conceiving
what English conventions are, he could not
see the social impossibility of the Court of
Beacon. It is firmly believed by those
who shared the experiment, that to the
very end Pym believed in that phantasmal

MANALIVE. 149

court and supposed it to be some Britannic
institution.

Towards the synod thus somewhat at a
standstill there approached through the
growing haze and gloaming a short dark
figure with a walk apparently founded on
the imperfect repression of a negro break-
down. Something at once in the familiarity
and the incongruity of this being moved
Michael to even heartier outbursts of a
healthy and humane flippancy.

"Why, here's little Nosey Gould," he
exclaimed. " Isn't the mere sight of him
enough to banish all your morbid re-
flections ? "

" Really," replied Dr. Warner, " I really fail
to see how Mr. Gould affects the question ;
and I once more demand — "

" Hello ! what's the funeral, gents ? "
inquired the newcomer with the air of
an uproarious umpire. " Doctor demandin'
something ? Always the way at a boarding-

1 50 MANALIVE.

house, you know. Always lots of demand.
No supply."

As delicately and impartially as he could,
Michael restated his position, and indicated
generally that Smith had been guilty of
certain dangerous and dubious acts, and that
there had even arisen an allegation that he
was insane.

"Well, of course he is," said Moses Gould
equably; "it don't need old 'Olmes to see that.
The 'awk-like face of 'Olmes," he added with
abstract relish, " showed a shide of disap-
pointment, the sleuth-like Gould 'avin' got
there before 'im."

" If he is mad," began Inglewood.

" Well," said Moses, " when a cove gets
out on the tiles the first night there's generally
a tile loose."

" You never objected before," said Diana
Duke rather stiffly, " and you're generally
pretty free with your complaints."

" I don't compline of him," said Moses

MANALIVE. 151

magnanimously, " the poor chap's 'armless
enough ; you might tie 'im up in the garden
here and 'e'd make noises at the burglars."

" Moses," said Moon with solemn fervour,
" you are the incarnation of Common Sense.
You think Mr. Innocent is mad. Let me
introduce you to the incarnation of Scien-
tific Theory. He also thinks Mr. Innocent is
mad. — Doctor, this is my friend Mr. Gould. —
Moses, this is the celebrated Dr. Cyrus Pym."
The celebrated Dr. Cyrus Pym closed his eyes
and bowed. He also murmured his national
war-cry in a low voice, which sounded
like "Pleased to meet you."

" Now you two people," said Michael
cheerfully, " who both think our poor
friend mad, shall jolly well go into that
house over there and prove him mad.
What could be more powerful than the com-
bination of Scientific Theory with Common
Sense ? United you stand ; divided you fall.
I will not be so uncivil as to suggest that

1 52 MANALIVE.

Dr. Pym has no common sense ; I confine
myself to recording the chronological accident
that he has not shown us any so far. I take
the freedom of an old friend in staking my
shirt that Moses has no scientific theory.
Yet against this strong coalition I am
ready to appear, armed with nothing but
an intuition — which is American for a
guess."

" Distinguished by Mr. Gould's assistance,"
said Pym, opening his eyes suddenly. " I
gather that though he and I are identical
in primary di-agnosis there is yet between
us something that cannot be called a dis-
agreement, something which we may perhaps
call a — " He put the points of thumb and
forefinger together, spreading the other fingers
exquisitely in the air, and seemed to be waiting
for somebody else to tell him what to say.

" Catchin' flies ? " inquired the affable
Moses.

" A divergence," said Dr. Pym, with a

MANALIVE. 153

refined sigh of relief ; " a divergence.
Granted that the man in question is deranged,
he would not necessarily be all that science
requires in a homicidal maniac — "

" Has it occurred to you," observed Moon,
who was leaning on the gate again, and did
not turn round, "that if he were a homicidal
maniac he might have killed us all here
while we were talking."

Something exploded silently underneath
all their minds, like sealed dynamite in some
forgotten cellars. They all remembered for
the first time for some hour or two that the
monster of whom they were talking was
standing quite silently among them. They
had left him in the garden like a garden
statue ; there might have been a dolphin
coiling round his legs, or a fountain pouring
out of his mouth, for all the notice they had
taken of Innocent Smith. He stood with
his crest of blonde, blown hair thrust some-
what forward, his fresh - coloured, rather

154 MANALIVE.

short-sighted face looking patiently down-
wards at nothing in particular, his huge
shoulders humped, and his hands in his
trousers pockets. So far as they could guess
he had not moved at all. His green coat
might have been cut out of the green turf
on which he stood. In his shadow Pym
had expounded and Rosamund expostulated,
Michael had ranted and Moses had ragged.
He had remained like a thing graven ; the
god of the garden. A sparrow had perched
on one of his heavy shoulders ; and then,
after correcting its costume of feathers, had
flown away.

" Why," cried Michael, with a shout of
laughter, " the Court of Beacon has opened
— and shut up again too. You all know
now I am right. Your buried common
sense has told you just what my buried
common sense has told me. Smith might
have fired off a hundred cannons instead of a
pistol, and you would still know he was

MANALIVE. 155

harmless as I know he is harmless. Back
we all go to the house and clear a room for
discussion. For the High Court of Beacon,
which has already arrived at its decision, is
just about to begin its inquiry."

"Just a goin' to begin !" cried little Mr.
Moses in an extraordinary sort of disinterested
excitement, like that of an animal during
music or a thunderstorm. " Follow on to
the 'Igh Court of Eggs and Bacon ; 'ave a
kipper from the old firm ! 'Is Lordship
complimented Mr. Gould on the 'igh pro-
fessional delicacy 'e had shown, and which
was worthy of the best traditions of the
Saloon Bar — and three of Scotch hot, miss !
Oh, chase me, girls ! "

The girls betraying no temptation to chase
him, he went away in a sort of waddling
dance of pure excitement ; and had made a
circuit of the garden before he reappeared,
breathless but still beaming. Moon had
known his man when he realized that no

156 MANALIVE.

people presented to Moses Gould could be
quite serious, even if they were quite furious.
The glass doors stood open on the side nearest
to Mr. Moses Gould ; and as the feet of that
festive idiot were evidently turned in the
same direction, everybody else went that
way with the unanimity of some uproarious
procession. Only Diana Duke retained
enough rigidity to say the thing that had
been boiling at her fierce feminine lips for
the last few hours. Under the shadow of
tragedy she had kept it back as unsym-
pathetic. " In that case," she said sharply,
" these cabs can be sent away."

" Well, Innocent must have his bag, you
know," said Mary with a smile. " I dare
say the cabman would get it down for us."

" I'll get the bag," said Smith, speaking
for the first time for hours ; his voice sounded
remote and rude, like the voice of a statue.

Those who had so long danced and dis-
puted round his immobility were left breath-

MANALIVE. 157

less by his precipitance. With a run and
spring he was out of the garden into the
street ; with a spring and one quivering
kick he was actually on the roof of the cab.
The cabman happened to be standing by the
horse's head, having just removed its emptied
nose-bag. Smith seemed for an instant to
be rolling about on the cab's back in the
embraces of his own Gladstone bag. The
next instant, however, he had rolled, as if by
a royal luck, into the high seat behind, and
with a shriek of piercing and appalling
suddenness had sent the horse flying and
scampering far away down the street.

His evanescence was so violent and swift,
that this time it was all the other people
who were turned into garden statues. Mr.
Moses Gould, however, being ill-adapted
both physically and morally for the purposes
of permanent sculpture, came to life some
time before the rest, and, turning to Moon,
remarked, like a man starting chattily with a

158 MANALIVE.

stranger on an omnibus, " Tile loose, eh ?
Cab loose anyhow." There followed a fatal
silence ; and then Dr. Warner said, with a
sneer like a club of stone, —

" This is what comes of the Court of
Beacon, Mr. Moon. You have let loose a
maniac on the whole metropolis."

Beacon House stood, as has been said, at
the end of a long crescent of continuous
houses. The little garden that shut it in
ran out into a sharp point like a green cape
pushed out into the sea of two streets. Smith
and his cab shot up one side of the triangle,
and certainly most of those standing inside it
never expected to see him again. At the
apex, however, he turned the horse sharply
round and drove with equal violence up the
other side of the garden, visible to all the
group. With a common impulse the little
crowd ran across the lawn as if to stop him,
but they soon had reason to duck and recoil.
Even as he vanished up street for the second

MANALIVE. 159

time, he let the big yellow bag fly from his
hand, so that it fell in the centre of the
garden, scattering the company like a bomb,
and nearly damaging Dr. Warner's hat for
the third time. Long before they had col-
lected themselves, the cab had shot away
with a shriek that went into a whisper.

" Well," said Michael Moon, with a very
queer note in his voice, " you may as well
all go inside anyhow ; it's getting rather
dark and cold. We've got two relics of Mr.
Smith at least ; his fiancee and his trunk."

" Why do you want us to go inside ? "
asked Arthur Inglewood, in whose red brow
and rough brown hair botheration seemed to
have reached its limit.

" I want the rest to go in," said Michael
in a clear voice, " because I want the whole
of this garden in which to talk to you."

There was an atmosphere of irrational
doubt ; it was really getting colder, and
a night wind had begun to wave the one or

160 MANALIVE.

two trees in the twilight. Dr. Warner, how-
ever, spoke in a voice devoid of indecision.

" I refuse to listen to any such proposal,"
he said ; " you have lost this ruffian, and I
must find him."

" I don't ask you to listen to any pro-
posal," answered Moon quietly ; " I only
ask you to listen."

He made a silencing movement with his
hand, and immediately the whistling noise
that had been lost in the dark streets on one
side of the house could be heard from quite
a new quarter on the other side. Through
the night-maze of streets the noise increased
with incredible rapidity, and the next
moment the flying hoofs and flashing wheels
had swept up to the blue-railed gate at
which they originally stood. Mr. Smith
got down from his perch with an air ot
absent-mindedness, and coming back into the
garden stood in the same in an elephantine
attitude as before.

MANALIVE. 161

" Get inside ! get inside ! " cried Moon
hilariously, with the air of one shooing a
company of cats. " Come, come, be quick
about it ! Didn't I tell you I wanted to
talk to Inglewood ? "

How they were all really driven into the
house again it would have been difficult
afterwards to say. They had reached the
point of being exhausted with incongruities,
as people at a farce are ill with laughing,
and the brisk growth of the storm among
the trees seemed like a final gesture of things
in general. Inglewood lingered behind
them, saying with a certain amicable ex-
asperation, " I say, do you really want to
speak to me ? "

" I do," said Michael, " very much."

Night had come as it generally does,
quicker than the twilight had seemed to
promise. While the human eye still felt
the sky as light gray, a very large and

lustrous moon appearing abruptly above a
6

1 62 MANALIVE.

bulk of roofs and trees, proved by contrast
that the sky was alieady a very dark gray
indeed. A drift of barren leaves across the
lawn, a drift of riven clouds across the sky,
seemed to be lifted on the same strong and
yet laborious wind.

" Arthur," said Michael, " I began with
an intuition ; but now I am sure. You and
I are going to defend this friend of yours
before the blessed Court of Beacon, and to
clear him too — clear him both of crime and
lunacy. Just listen to me while I preach
to you for a bit." They walked up and
down the darkening garden together as
Michael Moon went on.

" Can you," asked Michael, " shut your
eyes and see some of those queer old hiero-
glyphics they stuck up on white walls in
the old hot countries. How stiff they were
in shape and yet how gaudy in colour.
Think of some alphabet of arbitrary figures
picked out in black and red, or white and

MANALIVE. 163

green, with some old Semitic crowd of
Nosey Gould's ancestors staring at it, and
try to think why the people put it up
at all."

Inglewood's first instinct was to think
that his perplexing friend had really gone
off his head at last ; there seemed so reckless
a flight of irrelevancy from the tropic-
pictured walls he was asked to imagine to
the gray, wind-swept, and somewhat chilly
suburban garden in which he was actually
kicking his heels. How he could be more
happy in one by imagining the other he
could not conceive. Both (in themselves)
were unpleasant.

" Why does everybody repeat riddles,"
went on Moon abruptly, " even if they've
forgotten the answers ? Riddles are easy to
remember because they are hard to guess.
So were those stiff old symbols in black, red,
or green easy to remember because they had
been hard to guess. Their colours were

1 64 MANALIVE.

plain. Their shapes were plain. Every-
thing was plain except the meaning."

Inglewood was about to open his mouth
in an amiable protest, but Moon went on,
plunging quicker and quicker up and down
the garden and smoking faster and faster.
" Dances, too," he said ; " dances were not
frivolous. Dances were harder to understand
than inscriptions and texts. The old dances
were stiff, ceremonial, highly coloured but
silent. Have you noticed anything odd
about Smith ? "

"Well, really," cried Inglewood, left
behind in a collapse of humour, " have
I noticed anything else about him ? "

" Have you noticed this about him,"
asked Moon, with unshaken persistency,
" that he has done so much and said so
very little ? When first he came he talked,
but in a gasping, irregular sort of way, as
if he wasn't used to it. All he really did
was actions — painting red flowers on black

MANALIVE. 165

gowns or throwing yellow bags on to the
grass. I tell you that big green figure is
figurative — like any green figure capering
on some white Eastern wall."

" My dear Michael," cried Inglewood, in
a rising irritation which increased with the
rising wind, " you are getting absurdly
fanciful."

" I think of what has just happened,"
said Michael steadily. " The man has not
spoken for hours ; and yet he has been
speaking all the time. He fired three shots
from a six-shooter and then gave it up to
us, when he might have shot us dead in our
boots. How could he express his trust in
us better than that ? He wanted to be
tried by us. How could he have shown
it better than by standing quite still and
letting us discuss it ? He wanted to show
that he stood there willingly, and could
escape if he liked. How could he have
shown it better than by escaping in the

1 66 MANALIVE.

cab and coming back again ? Innocent
Smith is not a madman — he is a ritualist.
He wants to express himself, not with his
tongue, but with his arms and legs — with
my body I thee worship, as it says in the
marriage service. I begin to understand
the old plays and pageants. I see why the
mutes at a funeral were mute. I see why
the mummers were mum. They meant some-
thing ; and Smith means something too.
All other jokes have to be noisy — like
little Nosey Gould's jokes, for instance.
The only silent jokes are the practical
jokes. Poor Smith, properly considered, is
an allegorical practical joker. What he
has really done in this house has been as
frantic as a war-dance, but as silent as a
picture."

" I suppose you mean," said the other
dubiously, " that we have got to find out
what all these crimes meant, as if they were
so many coloured picture-puzzles. But even

MANALIVE. 167

supposing that they do mean something —
why, Lord bless my soul ! — "

Taking the turn of the garden quite
naturally, he had lifted his eyes to the moon,
by this time risen big and luminous, and had
seen a huge, half- human figure sitting on
the garden wall. It was outlined so sharply
against the moon that for the first flash it
was hard to be certain even that it was
human : the hunched shoulders and out-
standing hair had rather the air of a colossal
cat. It resembled a cat also in the fact that
when first startled it sprang up and ran with
easy activity along the top of the wall. As
it ran, however, its heavy shoulders and
small stooping head rather suggested a
baboon. The instant it came within reach
of a tree it made an ape-like leap and was
lost in the branches. The gale, which by
this time was shaking every shrub in the
garden, made the identification yet more
difficult, since it melted the moving limbs

1 68 MAN ALIVE.

of the fugitive in the multitudinous moving
limbs of the tree.

" Who is there ? " shouted Arthur. " Who
are you ? Are you Innocent ? "

" Not quite," answered an obscure voice
among the leaves. " I cheated you once
about a penknife."

The wind in the garden had gathered
strength, and was throwing the tree back-
wards and forwards with the man in the thick
of it, just as it had on the gay and golden
afternoon when he had first arrived.

" But are you Smith ? " asked Inglewood,
as in an agony.

" Very nearly," said the voice out of the
tossing tree.

" But you must have some real names,"
shrieked Inglewood in despair. " You must
call yourself something."

" Call myself something," thundered the
obscure, shaking the tree so that all its ten
thousand leaves seemed to be talking at

MANALIVE. 169

once. " I call myself Roland Oliver Isaiah
Charlemagne Arthur Hildebrand Homer
Danton Michaelangelo Shakespeare Brake-
speare — "

" But, manalive ! " began Inglewood in
exasperation.

" That's right ! that's right ! " came with
a roar out of the rocking tree ; " that's my
real name." And he broke a branch, and
one or two autumn leaves fluttered away
across the moon.

6a

PART II.

THE EXPLANATIONS OF
INNOCENT SMITH.

Chapter I.

THE EYE OF DEATH; OR, THE
MURDER CHARGE.

E dining-room of the Dukes had been
set out for the Court of Beacon with a
certain impromptu pomposity that seemed
somehow to increase its cosiness. The big
room was, as it were, cut up into small
rooms, with walls only waist high — the sort
of separations that children make when they
are playing at shops. This had been done by
Moses Gould and Michael Moon (the two
most active members of this remarkable
inquiry) with the ordinary furniture of the
place. At one end of the long mahogany
table was set the one enormous garden chair,
which was surmounted by the old torn tent or
umbrella which Smith himself had suggested
as a coronation canopy. Inside this erection

174 MANALIVE.

could be perceived the dumpy form of Mrs.
Duke, with cushions and a form of counte-
nance that already threatened slumber. At
the other end sat the accused Smith, in a
kind of dock ; for he was carefully fenced in
with a quadrilateral of light bedroom chairs,
any of which he could have tossed out of the
window with his big toe. He had been
provided with pens and paper, out of the
latter of which he made paper boats, paper
darts, and paper dolls contentedly through
the whole proceedings. He never spoke or
even looked up, but seemed as unconscious
as a child on the floor of an empty nursery.

On a row of chairs raised high on the top
of a long settee sat the three young ladies
with their backs up against the window, and
Mary Gray in the middle ; it was something
between a jury box and the stall of the
Queen of Beauty at a tournament. Down
the centre of the long table Moon had built
a low barrier out of eight bound volumes of

MANALIVE. 175

" Good Words " to express the moral wall
that divided the conflicting parties. On the
right side sat the two advocates of the
prosecution, Dr. Pym and Mr. Gould; behind,
a barricade of books and documents, chiefly
(in the case of Dr. Pym) solid volumes of
criminology. On the other side, Moon and
Inglewood, for the defence, were also fortified
with books and papers ; but as these included
several old yellow volumes by Ouida and
Wilkie Collins, the hand of Mr. Moon
seemed to have been somewhat careless and
comprehensive. As for the victim and prose-
cutor, Dr. Warner, Moon wanted at first to
have him kept entirely behind a high screen
in the corner, urging the indelicacy of his
appearance in court, but privately assuring
him of an unofficial permission to peep over
the top now and then. Dr. Warner, how-
ever, failed to rise to the chivalry of such a
course, and after some little disturbance and
discussion he was accommodated with a seat

176 MANALIVE.

on the right side of the table in a line with
his legal advisers.

It was before this solidly-established tri-
bunal that Dr. Cyrus Pym, after passing a
hand through the honey-coloured hair over
each ear, rose to open the case. His state-
ment was clear and even restrained, and such
flights of imagery as occurred in it only
attracted attention by a certain indescribable
abruptness, not uncommon in the flowers of
American speech.

He planted the points of his ten frail
fingers on the mahogany, closed his eyes, and
opened his mouth. " The time has gone
by," he said, " when murder could be re-
garded as a moral and individual act, im-
portant perhaps to the murderer, perhaps to
the murdered. Science has profoundly . . ."
here he paused, poising his compressed finger
and thumb in the air as if he were holding
an elusive idea very tight by its tail, then he
screwed up his eyes and said " modified,"

MANALIVE. 177

and let it go — " has profoundly Modified our
view of death. In superstitious ages it was
regarded as the termination of life, catas-
trophic, and even tragic, and was often
surrounded with solemnity. Brighter days,
however, have dawned, and we now see death
as universal and inevitable, as part of that great
soul-stirring and heart-upholding average
which we call for convenience the order of
nature. In the same way we have come
to consider murder socially. Rising above
the mere private feelings of a man while
being forcibly deprived of life, we are
privileged to behold murder as a mighty
whole, to see the rich rotation of the cosmos,
bringing, as it brings the golden harvests
and the golden-bearded harvesters, the return
for ever of the slayers and the slain."

He looked down, somewhat affected with
his own eloquence, coughed slightly, putting
up four of his pointed fingers with the
excellent manners of Boston, and continued :

i/8 MANALIVE.

" There is but one result of this happier
and humaner outlook which concerns the
wretched man before us. It is that thor-
oughly elucidated by a Milwaukee doctor,
our great secret-guessing Sonnenschein, in
his great work, ' The Destructive Type.'
We do not denounce Smith as a murderer,
but rather as a murderous man. The type
is such that its very life — I might say its
very health — is in killing. Some hold that
it is not properly an aberration, but a newer
and even a higher creature. My dear old
friend Dr. Bulger, who kept ferrets — " (here
Moon suddenly ejaculated a loud "hurrah ! "
but so instantaneously resumed his tragic ex-
pression that Mrs. Duke looked everywhere
else for the origin of the sound) ; Dr. Pym
continued somewhat sternly — " who, in the
interests of knowledge, kept ferrets, held
that the creature's ferocity is not utilitarian,
but absolutely an end in itself. However
this may be with ferrets, it is certainly so

MANALIVE. 179

with the prisoner. In his other iniquities
you may find the cunning of the maniac ;
but his acts of blood have almost the sim-
plicity of sanity. But it is the awful sanity
of the sun and the elements — a cruel, an
evil sanity. As soon stay the iris -leapt
cataracts of our virgin West as stay the
natural force that sends him forth to slay.
No environment, however scientific, could
have softened him. Place that man in the
silver-silent purity of the palest cloister, and
there will be some deed of violence done
with the crozier or the alb. Rear him in
a happy nursery, amid our brave - browed
Anglo-Saxon infancy, and he will find some
way to strangle with the skipping-rope or to
brain with the brick. Circumstances may be
favourable, training may be admirable, hopes
may be high, but the huge elemental hunger of
Innocent Smith for blood will in its appointed
season burst like a well-timed bomb."

Arthur Inglewood glanced curiously for

i8o MANALIVE.

an instant at the huge creature at the foot
of the table, who was fitting a paper figure
with a paper cocked hat, and then looked
back at Dr. Pym, who was concluding in
a quieter tone.

" It only remains for us," he said, " to
bring forward actual evidence of his previous
attempts. By an agreement already made
with the Court and the leaders of the
defence, we are permitted to put in evidence
authentic letters from witnesses to these
scenes, which the defence is free to examine.
Out of several cases of such outrages we
have decided to select one — the clearest and
most scandalous. I will therefore, without
further delay, call on my junior, Mr. Gould, to
read two letters — one from the Sub -Warden
and the other from the porter of Brakespeare
College, in Cambridge University."

Gould jumped up with a jerk like a
jack-in-the-box, an academic-looking paper in
his hand and a fever of importance on his

MANALIVE. 181

face. He began in a loud, high, cockney
voice that was as abrupt as cock-crow : —

« SIR, — Hi am the Sub- Warden of Brike-
speare College, Cambridge — "

" Lord have mercy on us," muttered
Moon, making a backward movement as
men do when a gun goes off.

" Hi am the Sub -Warden of Brikespeare
College, Cambridge," proclaimed the un-
compromising Moses, " and I can endorse
the description you give of the conduct of
the un'appy Smith. It was not alone my
unfortunate duty to rebuke many of the
lesser violences of his undergraduate period,
but I was actually a witness to the last
iniquity which terminated that period. Hi
happened to be passing under the house of
my friend the Warden of Brikespeare, which
is semi-detached from the College and con-
nected with it by two or three very ancient

1 82 MANALIVE.

arches or props, like bridges, across a small
strip of water connected with the river.
To my grive astonishment I be'eld my
eminent friend suspended in mid-air and
clinging to one of these pieces of masonry,
his appearance and attitude indicatin' that
he suffered from the grivest apprehensions.
After a short time I heard two^ very loud
shots, and distinctly perceived the unfortunate
undergraduate Smith leaning far out of the
Warden's window and aiming at the Warden
repeatedly with a revolver. Upon seeing me,
Smith burst into a loud laugh (in which
impertinence was mingled with insanity), and
appeared to desist. I sent the college porter
for a ladder, and he succeeded in detaching
the Warden from his painful position. Smith
was sent down. The photograph I enclose
is from the group of the University Rifle
Club prizemen, and represents him as he
was when at the College. — Hi am, your
obedient servant, AMOS BOULTER.

MANALIVE. 183

"The other letter," continued Gould in
a glow of triumph, " is from the porter, and
won't take long to read.

" DEAR SIR, — It is quite true that I am
the porter of Brikespeare College, and that
I 'elped the Warden down when the young
man was shooting at him, as Mr. Boulter
has said in his letter. The young man who
was shooting was Mr. Smith, the same that
is in the photograph Mr. Boulter sends. —
Yours respectfully, SAMUEL BARKER."

Gould handed the two letters across to
Moon, who examined them. But for the
vocal divergences in the matter of h's and
a's, the Sub -Warden's letter was exactly as
Gould had rendered it ; and both that and
the porter's letter were plainly genuine.
Moon handed them to Inglewood, who
handed them back in silence to Moses Gould.

" So far as this first charge of continual
attempted murder is concerned," said Dr.

1 84 MANALIVE.

Pym, standing up for the last time, " that
is my case."

Michael Moon rose for the defence with
an air of depression which gave little hope
at the outset to the sympathizers with the
prisoner. He did not, he said, propose to
follow the doctor into the abstract questions.
" I do not know enough to be an agnostic,"
he said, rather wearily, " and I can only
master the known and admitted elements in
such controversies. As for science and re-
ligion, the known and admitted facts are few
and plain enough. All that the parsons say
is unproved. All that the doctors say is
disproved. That's the only difference be-
tween science and religion there's ever been,
or will be. Yet these new discoveries touch
me, somehow," he said, looking down sorrow-
fully at his boots. "They remind me of
a dear old great-aunt of mine who used to
enjoy them in her youth. It brings tears
to my eyes. I can see the old bucket by

MANALIVE. 185

the garden fence and the line of shimmering
poplars behind — "

" Hi ! here, stop the 'bus a bit," cried
Mr. Moses Gould, rising in a sort of per-
spiration. " We want to give the defence a
fair run — like gents, you know ; but any
gent would draw the line at shimmering
poplars."

" Well, hang it all," said Moon, in an
injured manner, " if Dr. Pym may have
an old friend with ferrets, why mayn't I
have an old aunt with poplars ? "

" I am sure," said Mrs. Duke, bridling,
with something almost like a shaky authority,
" Mr. Moon may have what aunts he likes."

" Why, as to liking her," began Moon,
" I — but perhaps, as you say, she is scarcely
the core of the question. I repeat that I
do not mean to follow the abstract specula-
tions. For, indeed, my answer to Dr. Pym
is simple and severely concrete. Dr. Pym
has only treated one side of the psychology

1 86 MANALIVE.

of murder. If it be true that there is a
kind of man who has a natural tendency
to murder, is it not equally true " — here
he lowered his voice and spoke with a
crushing quietude and earnestness — " is it
not equally true that there is a kind of
man who has a natural tendency to get
murdered ? Is it not at least a hypoth-
esis holding the field that Dr. Warner
is such a man ? I do not speak with-
out the book, any more than my learned
friend. The whole matter is expounded in
Dr. Moonenschein's monumental work, ' The
Destructible Doctor,' with diagrams, show-
ing the various ways in which such a person
as Dr. Warner may be resolved into his
elements. In the light of these facts — "

" Hi, stop the 'bus ! stop the 'bus ! " cried
Moses, jumping up and gesticulating in great
excitement. " My principal's got something
to say ! My principal wants to do a bit of
talkinV

MANALIVE. 187

Dr. Pym was indeed on his feet, looking
pallid and rather vicious. " I have strictly
f0fl-fmed myself," he said nasally, " to books
to which immediate reference can be made.
I have Sonnenschein's ' Destructive Type '
here on the table, if the defence wish to
see it. Where is this wonderful work on
Destructibility Mr. Moon is talking about ?
Does it exist ? Can he produce it ? "

" Produce it ! " cried the Irishman with
a rich scorn. " I'll produce it in a week if
you'll pay for the ink and paper."

" Would it have much authority ? " asked
Pym, sitting down.

" Oh, authority ! " said Moon lightly ;
" that depends on a fellow's religion."

Dr. Pym jumped up again. " Our
authority is based on masses of accurate
detail," he said. " It deals with a region
in which things can be handled and tested.
My opponent will at least admit that death
is a fact of experience."

1 88 MANALIVE.

" Not of mine," said Moon mournfully,
shaking his head. " I've never experienced
such a thing in all my life."

"Well, really," said Dr. Pym, and sat
down sharply amid a crackle of papers.

" So we see," resumed Moon, in the same
melancholy voice, " that a man like Dr.
Warner is, in the mysterious workings of
evolution, doomed to such attacks. My
client's onslaught, even if it occurred, was
not unique. I have in my hand letters
from more than one acquaintance of Dr.
Warner whom that remarkable man has
affected in the same way. Following the
example of my learned friends I will read
only two of them. The first is from an
honest and laborious matron living off the
Harrow Road.

" MR. MOON, SIR, — Yes, I did throw a
sorsepan at him. Wot then ? It was all
I had to throw, all the soft things being

MANALIVE. 189

porned, and if your Docter Warner doesn't
like having sorsepans thrown at him, don't
let him were his hat in a respectable
woman's parler, and tell him to leave orf
smiling or tell us the joke. — Yours respect-
fully, HANNAH MILES.

" The other letter is from a physician of
some note in Dublin, with whom Dr.
Warner was once engaged in consultation.
He writes as follows : —

" DEAR SIR, — The incident to which you
refer is one which I regret, and which,
moreover, I have never been able to explain.
My own branch of medicine is not mental ;
and I should be glad to have the view of
a mental specialist on my singular momentary
and indeed almost automatic action. To
say that I c pulled Dr. Warner's nose ' is,
however, inaccurate in a respect that strikes
me as important. That I punched his nose

i9o MANALIVE.

I must cheerfully admit (I need not say
with what regret) ; but pulling seems to me
to imply a precision of handling and an
exactitude of objective with which I cannot
reproach myself. In comparison with this,
the act of punching was an outward, instan-
taneous, and even natural gesture. — Believe
me, yours faithfully,

" BURTON LESTRANGE.

" I have numberless other letters," con-
tinued Moon, " all bearing witness to this
widespread feeling about my eminent friend ;
and I therefore think that Dr. Pym should
have admitted this side of the question into
his survey. We are in the presence, as Dr.
Pym so truly says, of a natural force. As
soon stay the cataracts of the London water-
works as stay the great tendency of Dr.
Warner to be assassinated by somebody.
Place that man in a Quakers' meeting,
among the most peaceful of Christians, and

MANALIVE. 191

he will immediately be beaten to death with
sticks of chocolate. Place him among the
angels of the New Jerusalem, and he will
be stoned to death with precious stones.
Circumstances may be beautiful and wonder-
ful, the average may be heart-upholding,
the harvester may be golden-bearded, the
doctor may be secret-guessing, the cataract
may be iris-leapt, the Anglo-Saxon infant
may be brave-browed, but against and above
all these prodigies the grand simple tendency
of Dr. Warner to get murdered will still
pursue its way until it happily and trium-
phantly succeeds at last."

He pronounced this peroration with an
appearance of strong emotion. But even
stronger emotions were manifesting them-
selves on the other side of the table. Dr.
Warner had leaned his large body quite
across the little figure of Moses Gould and
was talking in excited whispers to Dr. Pym.
That expert nodded a great many times and

1 92 MANALIVE.

finally started to his feet with a sincere
expression of sternness.

" Ladies and gentlemen," he cried indig-
nantly, " as my colleague has said, we should
be delighted to give any latitude to the
defence — if there were a defence. But Mr.
Moon seems to think he is there to make
jokes — very good jokes I dare say, but not
at all adapted to assist his client. He picks
holes in science. He picks holes in my
client's social popularity. He picks holes
in my literary style, which doesn't seem to
suit his high-toned European taste. But
^how does this picking of holes affect the
issue ? This Smith has picked two holes in
my client's hat, and with an inch better aim
would have picked two holes in his head.
All the jokes in the world won't unpick
those holes or be any use for the defence."

Inglewood looked down in some embar-
rassment, as if shaken by the evident fairness
of this, but Moon still gazed at his opponent

MANALIVE. 193

in a dreamy way. " The defence ? " he
said vaguely — "oh, I haven't begun that yet."

" You certainly have not," said Pym
warmly, amid a murmur of applause from
his side, which the other side found it im-
possible to answer. " Perhaps, if you have
any defence, which has been doubtful from
the very beginning — "

" While you're standing up," said Moon,
in the same almost sleepy style, " perhaps I
might ask you a question."

" A question ? Certainly," said Pym stiffly.
" It was distinctly arranged between us that
as we could not cross-examine the witnesses,
we might vicariously cross-examine each
other. We are in a position to invite all
such inquiry."

" I think you said," observed Moon
absently, " that none of the prisoner's shots
really hit the doctor."

" For the cause of science," cried the
complacent Pym, " fortunately not."

7

i94 MANALIVE.

" Yet they were fired from a few feet
away."

" Yes ; about four feet/'

" And no shots hit the Warden, though
they were fired quite close to him too ? "
asked Moon.

" That is so," said the witness gravely.

" I think," said Moon, suppressing a slight
yawn, " that your Sub-Warden mentioned that
Smith was one of the University's record men
for shooting."

" Why, as to that — " began Pym, after an
instant of stillness.

" A second question," continued Moon,
comparatively curtly. " You said there
were other cases of the accused trying to
kill people. Why have you not got evidence
of them ? "

The American planted the points of his
fingers on the table again. " In those
cases," he said precisely, " there was no
evidence from outsiders, as in the Cam-

MANALIVE. 195

bridge case, but only the evidence of the
actual victims."

" Why didn't you get their evidence ? "

" In the case of the actual victims," said
Pym, " there was some difficulty and reluc-
tance, and — "

" Do you mean," asked Moon, " that none
of the actual victims would appear against
the prisoner ? "

" That would be exaggerative," began the
other.

" A third question," said Moon, so sharply
that every one jumped. " You've got the
evidence of the Sub- Warden who heard some
shots ; where's the evidence of the Warden
himself who was shot at ? The Warden of
Brakespeare lives, a prosperous gentleman."

" We did ask for a statement from him,"
said Pym a little nervously ; " but it was so
eccentrically expressed that we suppressed it
out of deference to an old gentleman whose
past services to science have been great."

196 MANALIVE.

Moon leaned forward. " You mean, I
suppose," he said, " that his statement was
favourable to the prisoner."

" It might be understood so," replied the
American doctor ; " but, really, it was diffi-
cult to understand at all. In fact, we sent
it back to him."

" You have no longer, then, any statement
signed by the Warden of Brakespeare."

" No."

" I only ask," said Michael quietly, " be-
cause we have. To conclude my case I will
ask my junior, Mr. Inglewood, to read a
statement of the true story — a statement
attested as true by the signature of the
warden himself."

Arthur Inglewood rose with several papers
in his hand, and though he looked somewhat
refined and self-effacing, as he always did,
the spectators were surprised to feel that his
presence was, upon the whole, more efficient
and sufficing than his leader's. He was, in

MANALIVE. 197

truth, one of those modest men who cannot
speak until they are told to speak ; and then
can speak well. Moon was entirely the
opposite. His own impudences amused him
in private, but they slightly embarrassed him
in public : he felt a fool while he was speak-
ing, whereas Inglewood felt a fool only be-
cause he could not speak. The moment he
had anything to say he could speak ; and
the moment he could speak speaking seemed
quite natural. v Nothing in this universe
seemed quite natural to Michael Moon.

" As my colleague has just explained,"
said Inglewood, " there are two enigmas or
inconsistencies on which we base the defence.
The first is a plain physical fact. By the
admission of everybody, by the very evidence
adduced by the prosecution, it is clear that
the accused was celebrated as a specially good
shot. Yet on both the occasions com-
plained of he shot at a man from a distance
of four or five feet, and shot at him four or five

198 MANALIVE.

times, and never hit him once. That is the
first startling circumstance on which we base
our argument. The second, as my colleague
has urged, is the curious fact that we cannot
find a single victim of these alleged outrages
to speak for himself. Subordinates speak
for him. Porters climb up ladders to him.
But he himself is silent. Ladies and gentle-
men, I propose to explain on the spot both
the riddle of the shots and the riddle of the
silence. I will first of all read the covering
letter in which the true account of the Cam-
bridge incident is contained, and then that
document itself. When you have heard
both, there will be no doubt about your
decision. The covering letter runs as
follows : —

" DEAR SIR, — The following is a very
exact and even vivid account of the incident
as it really happened at Brakespeare College.
We, the undersigned, do not see any

MANALIVE. 199

particular reason why we should refer it to
any isolated authorship. The truth is, it
has been a composite production ; and we
have even had some difference of opinion
about the adjectives. But every word of it
is true. — We are, yours faithfully,

" WILFRED EMERSON EAMES,

" Warden of Brakespeare College, Cambridge.

" INNOCENT SMITH.

" The enclosed statement " continued Ingle-
wood, " runs as follows : —

" A celebrated English university backs so
abruptly on the river, that it has, so to speak,
to be propped up and patched with all sorts
of bridges and semi-detached buildings. The
river splits itself into several small streams
and canals, so that in one or two corners the
place has almost the look of Venice. It was
so specially in the case with which we are
concerned, in which a few flying buttresses

200 MANALIVE.

or airy ribs of stone sprang across a strip of
water to connect Brakespeare College with
the house of the Warden of Brakespeare.

" The country around these colleges is flat;
but it does not seem flat when one is thus in
the midst of the colleges. For in these flat
fens there are always wandering lakes and
lingering rivers of water. And these always
change what might have been a scheme of
horizontal lines into a scheme of vertical lines.
Wherever there is water the height of high
buildings is doubled, and a British brick
house becomes a Babylonian tower. In that
shining unshaken surface the houses hang
head downwards exactly to their highest or
lowest chimney. The coral-coloured cloud
seen in that abyss is as far below the world
as its original appears above it. Every scrap
of water is not only a window but a skylight.
Earth splits under men's feet into precipitous
aerial perspectives, into which a bird could
as easily wing its way as — "

MANALIVE. 201

Dr. Cyrus Pym rose in protest. The
documents he had put in evidence had been
confined to cold affirmations of fact. The
defence, in a general way, had an indubitable
right to put their case in their own way,
but all this landscape gardening seemed to
him (Dr. Cyrus Pym) to be not up to the
business. " Will the leader of the defence
tell me," he asked, " how it can possibly
affect this case, that a cloud was cor'l-
coloured, or that the river was unshaken and
shiny, or that a bird could have winged
itself anywhere ? "

" Oh, I don't know," said Michael, lifting
himself lazily ; " you see, you don't know yet
what our defence is. Till you know that,
don't you see, anything may be relevant.
Why, suppose," he said suddenly, as if an
idea had struck him, " suppose we wanted
to prove the old Warden colour-blind.
Suppose he was shot by a black man with
white hair, when he thought he was being

7a

202 MANALIVE.

shot by a white man with yellow hair ! To
ascertain if that cloud was really and truly
coral-coloured might be of the most massive
importance."

He paused with a seriousness which was
hardly generally shared, and continued with
the same fluency : " Or suppose we wanted
to maintain that the Warden committed
suicide — that he just got Smith to hold
the pistol as Brutus's slave held the sword.
Why, it would make all the difference
whether the Warden could see himself plain
in still water. Still water has made hundreds
of suicides : one sees oneself so very — well,
so very plain."

" Do you, perhaps," inquired Pym with
austere irony, " maintain that your client
was a bird of some sort — say, a flamingo ? "

" In the matter of his being a flamingo,"
said Moon with sudden severity, " my client
reserves his defence."

No one quite knowing what to make of

MANALIVE. 203

this, Mr. Moon resumed his seat with an
air of great sternness, and Inglewood resumed
the reading of his document: —

" There is something pleasing to a mystic
in such a land of mirrors. For a mystic is
one who holds that two worlds are better
than one. In the highest sense, indeed, all
thought is reflection.

" This is the real truth, in the saying that
second thoughts are best. Animals have
no second thoughts : man alone is able to
see his own thought double, as a drunkard sees
a lamp-post ; man alone is able to see his own
thought upside down as one sees a house in
a puddle. This duplication of mentality, as
in a mirror, is (we repeat) the inmost thing
of human philosophy. There is a mystical,
even a monstrous truth, in the statement that
two heads are better than one. But they
ought both to grow on the same body.' "

" I know it's a little transcendental at first,"

204 MANALIVE.

interposed Inglewood, beaming round with a
broad apology, " but you see this document
was written in collaboration by a don and
a—"

" Drunkard, eh ? " suggested Moses Gould,
beginning to enjoy himself.

" I rather think," proceeded Inglewood
with an unruffled and critical air, " that this
part was written by the don. I merely warn
the Court that the statement, though indubit-
ably accurate, bears here and there the trace
of coming from two authors."

" In that case," said Dr. Pym, leaning back
and sniffing, " I cannot agree with them
that two heads are better than one."

" The undersigned persons think it need-
less to touch on a kindred problem so often
discussed at committees for University Re-
form: the question of whether dons see double
because they are drunk, or get drunk because
they see double. It is enough for them

MANALIVE. 205

(the undersigned persons) if they are able
to pursue their own peculiar and profitable
theme — which is puddles. What (the under-
signed persons ask themselves) is a puddle ?
A puddle repeats infinity, and is full of light ;
nevertheless, if analyzed objectively, a puddle is
a piece of dirty water spread very thin on mud.
The two great historic universities of Eng-
land have all this large and level and reflec-
tive brilliance. They repeat infinity. They
are full of light. Nevertheless, or, rather, on
the other hand, they are puddles — puddles,
puddles, puddles, puddles. The undersigned
persons ask you to excuse an emphasis in-
separable from strong conviction."

Inglewood ignored a somewhat wild ex-
pression on the faces of some present, and
continued with eminent cheerfulness : —

" Such were the thoughts that failed to
cross the mind of the undergraduate Smith as
he picked his way among the stripes of canal

206 MANALIVE.

and the glittering rainy gutters into which
the water broke up round the back of Brake-
speare College. Had these thoughts crossed
his mind he would have been very much
happier than he was. Unfortunately he did
not know that his puzzles were puddles. (jHIe
did not know that the academic mind reflects
infinity and is full of light by the simple
process of being shallow and standing still.)
In his case, therefore, there was something
solemn, and even evil about the infinity
implied. (It was half-way through a starry
night of bewildering brilliancy; stars were both
above and below. To young Smith's sullen
fancy the skies below seemed even hollower
than the skies above : he had a horrible idea
that if he counted the stars he would find one
too many in the pool.

" In crossing the little paths and bridges he
felt like one stepping on the black and slender
ribs of some cosmic Eiffel Tower. For to
him, and nearly all the educated youth of

MANALIVE. 207

that epoch, the stars were cruel things.
Though they glowed in the great dome
every night, they were an enormous and
ugly secret ; they uncovered the naked-
ness of nature ; they were a glimpse of the
iron wheels and pulleys behind the scenes.
For the young men of that sad time
thought that the god always came from
the machine. They did not know that in
reality the machine only comes from the
god. In short, they were all pessimists, and
starlight was atrocious to them — atrocious
because it was true. All their universe was
black with white spots.

"Smith looked up with relief from the
glittering pools below to the glittering skies
and the great black bulk of the college. The
only light other than stars glowed through
one peacock-green curtain in the upper
part of the building, marking where Dr.
Emerson Eames always worked till morning
and received his friends and favourite pupils

zo8 MANALIVE.

at any hour of the night. Indeed, it was
to his rooms that the melancholy Smith
was bound. Smith had been at Dr. Eames's
lecture for the first half of the morning, and
at pistol practice and fencing in a saloon for
the second half. He had been sculling madly
for the first half of the afternoon and thinking
idly (and still more madly) for the second
half. He had gone to a supper where he
was uproarious, and on to a debating club
where he was perfectly insufferable, and
the melancholy Smith was melancholy still.
Then, as he was going home to his diggings
he remembered the eccentricity of his friend
and master, the Warden of Brakespeare, and
resolved desperately to turn in to that gentle-
man's private house.

"Emerson Eames was an eccentric in many
ways, but his throne in philosophy and meta-
physics was of international eminence ; the
university could hardly have afforded to lose
him, and, moreover, a don has only to continue

MANALIVE. 209

any of his bad habits long enough to make
them a part of the British Constitution. The
bad habits of Emerson Eames were to sit up
all night and to be a student of Schopenhauer.
Personally, he was a lean, lounging sort of man,
with a blond pointed beard, not so very much
older than his pupil Smith in the matter of
mere years, but older by centuries in the
two essential respects of having a European
reputation and a bald head.

" ' I came, against the rules, at this unearthly
hour,' said Smith, who was nothing to the
eye except a very big man trying to make
himself small, ' because I am coming to the
conclusion that existence is really too rotten.
I know all the arguments of the thinkers
that think otherwise — bishops, and agnostics,
and those sort of people. And knowing you
were the greatest living authority on the
pessimist thinkers — '

"'All thinkers,' said Eames, 'are pessi-
mist thinkers.'

210 MANALIVE.

"After a patch of pause, not the first —
for this depressing conversation had gone on
for some hours with alternations of cynicism
and silence — the Warden continued with his
air of weary brilliancy : ' It's all a question
of wrong calculation. The moth flies into
the candle because he doesn't happen to
know that the game is not worth the
candle. The wasp gets into the jam in
hearty and hopeful efforts to get the jam
into him. /In the same way the vulgar
people want to enjoy life just as they want
to enjoy gin — because they are too stupid to
see that they are paying too big a price for iV
/That they never find happiness — that they
Mon't even know how to look for it — is
proved by the paralyzing clumsiness and
ugliness of everything they 'do) Their dis-
cordant colours are cries of -j5ain. Look at
the brick villas beyond the college on this
side of the river. There's one with spotted
blinds ; look at it ! just go and look at it ! '

MANALIVE. 211

"'Of course/ he went on dreamily, 'one
or two men see the sober fact a long way
off — they go mad. Do you notice that
maniacs mostly try either to destroy other
things, or (if they are thoughtful) to destroy
themselves ? The madman is the man behind
the scenes, like the man that wanders about
the coulisse of a theatre. He has only opened
the wrong door and come into the right
place. He sees things at the right angle.
But the common world — '

" ' Oh, hang the world ! ' said the sullen
Smith, letting his fist fall on the table in an
idle despair.

'"Let's give it a bad name first,' said the
Professor calmly, ' and then hang it. A
puppy with hydrophobia would probably
struggle for life while we killed it ; but
if we were kind we should kill it. So an
omniscient god would put us out of our
pain. He would strike us dead.'

"'Why doesn't he strike us dead?' asked

212 MANALIVE.

the undergraduate abstractedly, plunging his
hands into his pockets.

" ' He is dead himself,' said the philoso-
pher ; 'that is where he is really enviable,'

"'To any one who thinks,' proceeded
Eames, c the pleasures of life, trivial and
soon tasteless, are bribes to bring us into
a torture chamber. We all see that for any
thinking man mere extinction is the . . .
What are you doing ? . . . Are you mad ? . . .
Put that thing down.'

"Dr. Earnes had turned his tired but still
talkative head over his shoulder, and had
found himself looking into a small round
black hole, rimmed by a six-sided circlet
of steel, with a sort of spike standing up
on the top. It fixed him like an iron eye.
Through those eternal instants during which
the reason is stunned he did not even know
what it was. Then he saw behind it the
chambered barrel and cocked hammer of a
revolver, and behind that the flushed and

MANALIVE. 213

rather heavy face of Smith, apparently quite
unchanged, or even more mild than before.

"Til help you out of your hole, old
man,' said Smith, with rough tenderness.
Til put the puppy out of his pain.'

"Emerson Eames retreated towards the
window. c Do you mean to kill me ? '
he cried.

"'It's not a thing I'd do for every one,'
said Smith with emotion ; ' but you and I
seem to have got so intimate to-night, some-
how. I know all your troubles now, and the
only cure, old chap.'

" ' Put that thing down,' shouted the
Warden.

" ' It'll soon be over, you know,' said
Smith with the air of a sympathetic dentist.
And as the Warden made a run for the window
and balcony, his benefactor followed him with
a firm step and a compassionate expression.

" Both men were perhaps surprised to see
that the gray and white of early daybreak

2i4 MANALIVE.

had already come. One of them, however,
had emotions calculated to swallow up
surprise. Brakespeare College was one of
the few that retained real traces of Gothic
ornament, and just beneath Dr. Eames's
balcony there ran out what had perhaps been
a flying buttress, still shapelessly shaped into
gray beasts and devils, but blinded with mosses
and washed out with rains. With an un-
gainly and most courageous leap, Eames
sprang out on this antique bridge, as the only
possible mode of escape from the maniac.
He sat astride of it, still in his academic
gown, dangling his long thin legs, and con-
sidering further chances of flight. The
whitening daylight opened under as well as
over him that impression of vertical infinity
already remarked about the little lakes
round Brakespeare. Looking down and
seeing the spires and chimneys pendent
in the pools, they felt alone in space. They
Felt as if they were peering over the edge

MANALIVE. 2^5

from the North Pole and seeing the South
Pole below.

" ' Hang the world, we said,' observed
Smith, ' and the world is hanged. " He
has hanged the world upon nothing," says
the Bible. Do you like being hanged upon
nothing ? I'm going to be hanged on
something myself. I'm going to swing for
you . . . Dear, tender old phrase,' he
murmured ; ' never true till this moment.
I am going to swing for you. For you,
dear friend. For your sake. At your
express desire.'

"'Help!' cried the Warden of Brake-
speare College ; ' help ! '

" c The puppy struggles,' said the under-
graduate, with an eye of pity ; ' the poor
little puppy struggles. How fortunate it is
that I am wiser and kinder than he,' and he
sighted his weapon so as exactly to cover the
upper part of Eames's bald head.

" ' Smith,' said the philosopher with a

2i 6 MANALIVE.

sudden change to a sort of ghastly lucidity,
' I shall go mad.'

"'And so look at things from the right
angle/ observed Smith, sighing gently.
c Ah, but madness is only a palliative at best,
a drug. The only cure is an operation — an
operation that is always successful : death.'

" As he spoke the sun rose. It seemed to
put colour into everything, with the rapidity
of a lightning artist. A fleet of little clouds
sailing across the sky changed from pigeon-
gray to pink. All over the little academic
town the tops of different buildings took on
different tints : here the sun would pick out
the green enamel on a pinnacle, there the
scarlet tiles of a villa ; here the copper
ornament on some artistic shop, and there the
sea-blue slates of some old and steep church
roof. All these coloured crests seemed to have
something oddly individual and significant
about them, like crests of famous knights
pointed out in a pageant or a battlefield :

MANALIVE. 217

they each arrested the eye, especially the
rolling eye of Emerson Eames as he looked
round on the morning and accepted it as his
last. Through a narrow chink between a
black timber tavern and a big gray college
he could see a clock with gilt hands which
the sunshine set on fire. He stared at it as
though hypnotized ; and suddenly the clock
began to strike, as if in personal reply. As
if at a signal, clock after clock took up the
cry : all the churches awoke like chickens
at cockcrow. The birds were already noisy
in the trees behind the college. The sun
rose, gathering glory that seemed too full for
the deep skies to hold, and the shallow
waters beneath them seemed golden and
brimming and deep enough for the thirst of
the gods. Just round the corner of the
College, and visible from his crazy perch,
were the brightest specks on that bright
landscape, the villa with the spotted blinds
which he had made his text that night. He

218 MANALIVE.

wondered for the first time what people lived
in them.

" Suddenly he called out with mere queru-
lous authority, as he might have called to a
student to shut a door.

" £ Let me come off this place,' he cried ;
' I can't bear it.'

" ' I rather doubt if it will bear you,' said
Smith critically ; c but before you break your
neck, or I blow out your brains, or let you
back into this room (on which complex
points I am undecided), I want the meta-
physical point cleared up. Do I understand
that you want to get back to life ? '

" c I'd give anything to get back,' replied
the unhappy professor.

" c Give anything ! ' cried Smith ; c then,
blast your impudence, give us a song ! '

" ' What do you mean ? ' demanded the
exasperated Eames ; ' what song ? '

"CA hymn, I think, would be most ap-
propriate,' answered the other gravely.

MANALIVE. 219

' I'll let you off if you'll repeat after me the
words —

" ' I thank the goodness and the grace

That on my birth have smiled,
And perched me on this curious place,
A happy English child.'

" Dr. Emerson Eames having briefly com-
plied, his persecutor abruptly told him to
hold his hands up in the air. Vaguely
connecting this proceeding with the usual
conduct of brigands and bushrangers, Mr.
Eames held them up, very stiffly, but
without marked surprise. A bird alighting
on his stone seat took no more notice of
him than of a comic statue.

" ' You are now engaged in public
worship,' remarked Smith severely, £ and
before I have done with you, you shall
thank God for the very ducks on the pond/

" The celebrated pessimist half articulately
expressed his perfect readiness to thank God
for the ducks on the pond.

220 MANALIVE.

" ' Not forgetting the drakes/ said Smith
sternly. (Eames weakly conceded the drakes.)
' Not forgetting anything, please. You shall
thank heaven for churches and chapels and
villas and vulgar people and puddles and pots
and pans and sticks and rags and bones and
spotted blinds.'

" ' All right, all right,' repeated the
victim in despair ; c sticks and rags and
bones and blinds.'

" ' Spotted blinds, I think we said,' re-
marked Smith with a roguish ruthlessness,
and wagging the pistol-barrel at him like a
long metallic ringer.

" c Spotted blinds,' said Emerson Eames
faintly.

" ' You can't say fairer than that,' ad-
mitted the younger man, ' and now I'll just
tell you this to wind up with. If you really
were what you profess to be, I don't see that
it would matter to snail or seraph if you broke
your impious stiff neck and dashed out all

MANALIVE. 221

your drivelling devil-worshipping brains.
But in strict biographical fact you are a
very nice fellow, addicted to talking putrid
nonsense, and I love you like a brother.
I shall therefore fire off all my cartridges
round your head so as not to hit you (I am
a good shot, you may be glad to hear), and
then we will go in and have some breakfast.'

" He let off two barrels in the air, which
the Professor endured with singular firm-
ness, and then said, ' But don't fire them
all off.'

" ' Why not ? ' asked the other buoyantly.

" ' Keep them,' answered his companion,
4 for the next man you meet who talks as
we were talking.'

" It was at this moment that Smith,
looking down, perceived apopletic terror
upon the face of the Sub- Warden, and heard
the refined shriek with which he summoned
the porter and the ladder.

"It took Dr. Eames some little time to

222 MANALIVE.

disentangle himself from the ladder, and some
little time longer to disentangle himself from
the Sub- Warden. But as soon as he could
do so unobtrusively, he rejoined his com-
panion in the late extraordinary scene. He
was astonished to find the gigantic Smith
heavily shaken, and sitting with his shaggy
head on his hands. When addressed, he
lifted a very pale face.

" ' Why, what is the matter ? ' asked
Eames, whose own nerves had by this time
twittered themselves quiet, like the morning
birds.

" ' I must ask your indulgence,' said
Smith, rather brokenly. ' I must ask you to
realize that I have just had an escape from
death.'

" ' You have had an escape from death ? '
repeated the Professor in not unpardonable
irritation. ' Well, of all the cheek — '

" ' Oh, don't you understand, don't you
understand ? ' cried the pale young man

MANALIVE. 223

impatiently. ' I had to do it, Eames ; I had
to prove you wrong or die. When a man's
young, he nearly always has some one whom
he thinks the top-water mark of the mind of
man — some one who knows all about it, if
anybody knows.

" ' Well, you were that to me ; you spoke
with authority, and not as the scribes.
Nobody could comfort me if you said there
was no comfort. If you really thought there
was nothing anywhere, it was because you
had been there to see. Don't you see that I
had to prove you didn't really mean it ? — or
else drown myself in the canal.'

" ' Well,' said Eames hesitatingly, ' I
think perhaps you confuse — '

"'Oh, don't tell me that!' cried Smith
with the sudden clairvoyance of mental pain ;
' don't tell me that I confuse enjoyment of
existence with the Will to Live ! That's
German, and German is High Dutch, and
High Dutch is Double Dutch. The thing I

224 MANALIVE.

saw shining in your eyes when you dangled
on that bridge was enjoyment of life and not
"the Will to Live)" What you knew when
you sat on that damned gargoyle was that
the world, when all is said and done, is a
wonderful and beautiful place ; I know it,
because I knew it at the same minute. I
saw the gray clouds turn pink, and the little
gilt clock in the crack between the houses.
It was those things you hated leaving, not
Life, whatever that is. Eames, we've been
to the brink of death together ; won't you
admit I am right ? '

" ' Yes,' said Eames very slowly, ' I think
you are right. You shall have a First ! '

" ' Right ! ' cried Smith, springing up
reanimated. ' I've passed with honours, and
now let me go and see about being sent
down.'

" c You needn't be sent down,' said Eames
with the quiet confidence of twelve years of
intrigue. ' Everything with us .me from

MANALIVE. 225

the man on top to the people just round him :
I am the man on top, and I shall tell the
people round me the truth.'

" The massive Mr. Smith rose and went •
slowly to the window, but he spoke with
equal firmness. ' I must be sent down/ he
said, c and the people must not be told the
truth.'

"'And why not ? ' asked the other.

"'Because I mean to follow your advice,'
answered the massive youth, in heavy
meditation. ' I mean to keep the remaining
shots for people in the shameful state you and
I were in last night — I wish we could even
plead drunkenness. I mean to keep those
bullets for pessimists — pills for pale people.
And in this way I want to walk the world
like a wonderful surprise — to float as idly as
the thistledown, and come as silently as the
sunrise ; not to be expected any more than
the thunderbolt, not to be recalled any more
than- *e dS^.ig breeze. I don't want people

226 MANALIVE.

to anticipate me as a well-known practical
joke. I want both my gifts to come virgin
and violent, the death and the life after death.
I am going to hold a pistol to the head of
the Modern Man. But I shall not use it to
kill him — only to bring him to life. I
begin to see a new meaning in being the
skeleton at the feast.'

"'You can scarcely be called a skeleton/
said Dr. Eames, smiling.

"'That comes of being so much at the
feast/ answered the massive youth. ' No
skeleton can keep his figure if he is always
dining out. But that is not quite what I
meant : what I mean is that I caught a
kind of glimpse of the meaning of death and
all that — the skull and cross-bones, the
memento mori. It isn't only meant to remind
us of a future life, but to remind us of a
present life too. With our weak spirits we
should grow old in eternity if we were not
kept young by death. Providence has to

MANALIVE. 227

cut immortality into lengths for us, as nurses
cut the bread and butter into fingers/

"Then he added suddenly in a voice of
unnatural actuality, ' But I know something
now, Eames. I knew it when the clouds
turned pink.'

" ' What do you mean ? ' asked Eames.
* What did you know ? '

"'I knew for the first time that murder
is really wrong.'

" He gripped Dr. Eames's hand and groped
his way somewhat unsteadily to the door.
Before he had vanished through it he had
added, ' It's very dangerous, though, when a
man thinks for a split second that he under-
stands death.'

" Dr. Eames remained in repose and rumi-
nation some hours after his late assailant
had left. Then he rose, took his hat and
umbrella, and went for a brisk if rotatory
walk. Several times, however, he stood
outside the villa with the spotted blinds,

228 MANALIVE.

studying them intently with his head slightly
on one side. Some took him for a lunatic
and some for an intending purchaser. He
is not yet sure that the two characters would
be widely different.

"The above narrative has been constructed
on a principle which is, in the opinion of
the undersigned persons, new in the art of
letters. Each of the two actors is described
as he appeared to the other. But the under-
signed persons absolutely guarantee the ex-
actitude of the story ; and if their version
of the thing be questioned, they, the under-
signed persons, would deucedly well like to
know who does know about it if they
don't.

"The undersigned persons will now ad-
journ to ' The Spotted Dog ' for beer.

Farewell.

" (Signed) JAMES EMERSON EAMES,

" Warden of Brakespeare College, Cambridge.

" INNOCENT SMITH."

Chapter II.

THE TWO CURATES; OR, THE
BURGLARY CHARGE.

ARTHUR INGLEWOOD handed the
document he had just read to the leaders
of the prosecution, who examined it with
their heads together. Both the Jew and the
American were of sensitive and excitable
stocks, and they revealed by the jumpings
and bumpings of the black head and the
yellow that nothing could be done in the
way of denial of the document. The letter
from the Warden was as authentic as the
letter from the Sub- Warden, however regret-
tably different in dignity and social tone.

" Very few words," said Inglewood, " are
required to conclude our case in this matter.

230 MANALIVE.

Surely it is now plain that our client carried
his pistol about with the eccentric but in-
nocent purpose of giving a wholesome scare
to those whom he regarded as blasphemers.
In each case the scare was so wholesome
that the victim himself has dated from it as
from a new birth. Smith, so far from being
a madman, is rather a mad doctor — he walks
the world curing frenzies and not distributing
them. That is the answer to the two un-
answerable questions which I put to the
prosecutors. That is why they dared not
produce a line by any one who had actually
confronted the pistol. All who had actually
confronted the pistol confessed that they had
profited by it. That was why Smith, though
a good shot, never hit anybody. He never
hit anybody because he was a good shot.
His mind was as clear of murder as his hands
are of blood. This, 1 say, is the only possible
explanation of these facts and of all the other
facts. No one can possibly explain the

MANALIVE. 231

Warden's conduct except by believing the
Warden's story. Even Dr. Pym, who is a
very factory of ingenious theories, could find
no other theory to cover the case."

" There are promising per-spectives in
hypnotism and dual personality," said Dr.
Cyrus Pym dreamily ; " the science of crim-
inology is in its infancy, and — "

" Infancy ! " cried Moon, jerking his red
pencil in the air with a gesture of enlighten-
ment ; " why, that explains it ! "

" I repeat," proceeded Inglewood, " that
neither Dr. Pym nor any one else can account
on any other theory but ours for the Warden's
signature, for the shots missed and the wit-
nesses missing."

The little Yankee had slipped to his feet
with some return of a cock-fighting coolness.
"The defence," he said, "omits a coldly
colossal fact. They say we produce none
of the actual victims. Wai, here is one
victim — England's celebrated and stricken

232 MANALIVE.

Warner. I reckon he is pretty well produced.
And they suggest that all the outrages were
followed by reconciliations. Wai, there's
no flies on England's Warner ; and he isn't
reconciliated much."

" My learned friend," said Moon, getting
elaborately to his feet, " must remember that
the science of shooting Dr. Warner is in its
infancy. Dr. Warner would strike the idlest
eye as one specially difficult to startle into
any recognition of the glory of God. We
admit that our client, in this one instance,
failed, and that the operation was not suc-
cessful. But I am empowered to offer, 'on
behalf of my client, a proposal for operating
on Dr. Warner again, at his earliest con-
venience, and without further fees."

" 'Ang it all, Michael," cried Gould, quite
serious for the first time in his life, * you
might give us a bit of bally sense for a
chinge."

" What was Dr. Warner talking about

MANALIVE. 233

just before the first shot ? " asked Moon
sharply.

" The creature," said Dr. Warner super-
ciliously, " asked me, with characteristic
rationality, whether it was my birthday."

" And you answered, with characteristic
swank," cried Moon, shooting out a long
lean finger, as rigid and arresting as the pistol
of Smith, " that you didn't keep your
birthday."

" Something like that," assented the
doctor.

" Then," continued Moon, " he asked you
why not, and you said it was because you
didn't see that birth was anything to rejoice
over. Agreed ? Now, is there any one
who doubts that our tale is true ? "

There was a cold crash of stillness in the
room ; and Moon said, " Pax populivox Dei;
it is the silence of the people that is the
voice of God. Or in Dr. Pym's more
civilized language, it is up to him to open

8a

234 MANALIVE.

the next charge. On this we claim an
acquittal."

It was about an hour later. Dr. Cyrus
Pym had remained for an unprecedented
time with his eyes closed and his thumb and
finger in the air. It almost seemed as if he
had been " struck so," as the nurses say ; and
in the deathly silence Michael Moon felt
forced to relieve the strain with some remark.
For the last half-hour or so the eminent
criminologist had been explaining that science
took the same view of offences against prop-
erty as it did of offences against life. "Most
murder," he had said, " is a variation of
homicidal mania, and in the same way most
theft is a version of kleptomania. I cannot
entertain any doubt that my learned friends
opposite adequately con-ceive how this must
involve a scheme of punishment more tol'rant
and humane than the • cruel methods of
ancient codes. They will doubtless exhibit
consciousness of a chasm so eminently yawn-

MANALIVE. 235

ing, so thought -arresting, so — " It was
here that he paused and indulged in the
delicate gesture to which allusion has been
made ; and Michael could bear it no longer.

" Yes, yes," he said impatiently, " we
admit the chasm. The old cruel codes
accused a man of theft and sent him to prison
for ten years. The tolerant and humane
ticket accuses him of nothing and sends him
to prison for ever. We pass the chasm."

It was characteristic of the eminent Pym,
in one of his trances of verbal fastidiousness,
that he went on, unconscious not only of his
opponent's interruption, but even of his own
pause.

" So stock -improving," continued Dr.
Cyrus Pym, " so fraught with real high
hopes of the future. Science therefore re-
gards thieves, in the abstract, just as it regards
murderers. It regards them not as sinners
to be punished for an arbitrary period, but
as patients to be detained and cared for "

236 MANALIVE.

(his two first digits closed again as he hesi-
tated)— " in short, for the required period.
But there is something special in the case
we investigate here. Kleptomania commonly
con-joins itself — "

" I beg pardon," said Michael ; " I did
not ask just now because, to tell the truth, I
really thought Dr. Pym, though seemingly
vertical, was enjoying well-earned slumber,
with a pinch in his fingers of scentless and
delicate dust. But now that things are
moving a little more, there is something I
should really like to know. I have hung on
Dr. Pym's lips, of course, with an interest
that it were weak to call rapture, but I have
so far been unable to form any conjecture
about what the accused, in the present in-
stance, is supposed to have been and gone
and done."

" If Mr. Moon will have patience," said
Pym with dignity, " he will find that this
was the very point to which my exposition

MANALIVE. 237

was di-rected. Kleptomania, I say, exhibits
itself as a kind of physical attraction to
certain defined materials ; and it has been
held (by no less a man than Harris) that this
is the ultimate explanation of the strict
specialism and vurry narrow professional
outlook of most criminals. One will have
an irresistible physical impulsion towards pearl
sleeve-links, while he passes over the most
elegant and celebrated diamond sleeve-links,
placed about in the most con-spicuous loca-
tions. Another will impede his flight with
no less than forty-seven buttoned boots, while
elastic-sided boots leave him cold, and even
sarcastic. The specialism of the criminal, I
repeat, is a mark rather of insanity than
of any brightness of business habits ; but
there is one kind of depredator to whom this
principle is at first sight hard to apply. I
allude to our fellow-citizen the housebreaker.
" It has been maintained by some of our
boldest young truth-seekers, that the eye

238 MANALIVE.

of a burglar beyond the back-garden wall
could hardly be caught and hypnotized by a
fork that is insulated in a locked box under
the butler's bed. They have thrown down
the gauntlet to American science on this
point. They declare that diamond links are
not left about in conspicuous locations in the
haunts of the lower classes, as they were in
the great test experiment of Calypso College.
We hope this experiment here will be an
answer to that young ringing challenge, and
will bring the burglar once more into line
and union with his fellow-criminals."

Moon, whose face had gone through every
phase of black bewilderment for five minutes
past, suddenly lifted his hand and struck the
table in explosive enlightenment.

" Oh, I see ! " he cried ; " you mean that
Smith is a burglar."

" I thought I made it quite ad'quately
lucid," said Mr. Pym, folding up his eyelids.
It was typical of this topsy-turvy private

MANALIVE. 239

trial that all the eloquent extras, all the
rhetoric or digression on either side, was
exasperating and unintelligible to the other.
Moon could not make head or tail of the
solemnity of a new civilization. Pym could
not make head or tail of the gaiety of an old
one.

" All the cases in which Smith has
figured as an expropriator," continued the
American doctor, " are cases of burglary.
Pursuing the same course as in the previous
case, we select the indubitable instance from
the rest, and we take the most correct cast-iron
evidence. I will now call on my colleague,
Mr. Gould, to read a letter we have received
from the earnest, unspotted Canon of Dur-
ham, Canon Hawkins."

Mr. Moses Gould leapt up with his usual
alacrity to read the letter from the earnest
and unspotted Hawkins. Moses Gould
could imitate a farmyard well, Sir Henry
Irving not so well, Marie Lloyd to a point

240 MANALIVE.

of excellence, and the new motor horns in a
manner that put him upon the platform of
great artists. But his imitation of a Canon
of Durham was not convincing ; indeed, the
sense of the letter was so much obscured by
the extraordinary leaps and gasps of his pro-
nunciation that it is perhaps better to print
it here as Moon read it when, a little later,
it was handed across the table.

" DEAR SIR, — I can scarcely feel surprise
that the incident you mention, private as it
was, should have filtered through our omniv-
orous journals to the mere populace ; for the
position I have since attained makes me, I
conceive, a public character, and this was
certainly the most extraordinary incident in
a not uneventful and perhaps not an un-
important career. I am by no means with-
out experience in scenes of civil tumult.
I have faced many a political crisis in the
old Primrose League days at Herne Bay,

MANALIVE. 241

and, before I broke with the wilder set,
have spent many a night at the Christian
Social Union. But this other experience
was quite inconceivable. I can only de-
scribe it as the letting loose of a place
which it is not for me, as a clergyman, to
mention.

" It occurred in the days when I was, for a
short period, a curate at Hoxton ; and the
other curate, then my colleague, induced me
to attend a meeting which he described, I
must say profanely described, as calculated
to promote the kingdom of God. I found,
on the contrary, that it consisted entirely of
men in corduroys and greasy clothes whose
manners were coarse and their opinions
extreme.

" Of my colleague in question I wish to
speak with the fullest respect and friendli-
ness, and I will therefore say little. No one
can be more convinced than I of the evil of
politics in the pulpit ; and I never offer my

242 MANALIVE.

congregation any advice about voting except
in cases in which I feel strongly that they
are likely to make an erroneous selection.
But, while I do not mean to touch at all
upon political or social problems, I must say
that for a clergyman to countenance, even in
jest, such discredited nostrums of dissipated
demagogues as Socialism or Radicalism par-
takes of the character of the betrayal of a
sacred trust. Far be it from me to say a
word against the Reverend Raymond Percy,
the colleague in question. He was brilliant,
I suppose, and to some apparently fascinat-
ing ; but a clergyman who talks like a
Socialist, wears his hair like a pianist, and
behaves like an intoxicated person, will never
rise in his profession, or even obtain the
admiration of the good and wise. Nor is it
for me to utter my personal judgments of
the appearance of the people in the hall.
Yet a glance round the room, revealing
ranks of debased and envious faces — "

MANALIVE. 243

" Adopting," said Moon explosively, for
he was getting restive — "adopting the
reverend gentleman's favourite figure of
logic, may I say that while tortures would
not tear from me a whisper about his in-
tellect, he is a blasted old jackass."

" Really! " said Dr Pym ; " I protest."

" You must keep quiet, Michael," said
Inglewood ; " they have a right to read
their story."

" Chair ! Chair ! Chair ! " cried Gould,
rolling about exuberantly in his own ; and
Pym glanced for a moment towards the
canopy which covered all the authority of
the Court of Beacon.

"Oh, don't wake the old lady," said
Moon, lowering his own voice in a moody
good-humour. " I apologize. I won't in-
terrupt again."

Before the little eddy of interruption was
ended the reading of the clergyman's letter
was already continuing.

244 MANALIVE.

" The proceedings opened with a speech
from my colleague, of which I will say
nothing. It was deplorable. Many of the
audience were Irish, and showed the weak-
ness of that impetuous people. When
gathered together into gangs and con-
spiracies they seem to lose altogether that
lovable good-nature and readiness to accept
anything one tells them which distinguishes
them as individuals."

With a slight start, Michael rose to his
feet, bowed solemnly, and sat down again.

" These persons, if not silent, were at
least applausive during the speech of Mr.
Percy. He descended to their level with
witticisms about rent and a reserve of
labour. Confiscation, expropriation, arbitra-
tion, and such words with which I cannot
soil my lips, recurred constantly. Some
hours afterwards the storm broke. I had
been addressing the meeting for some time,

MANALIVE. 245

pointing out the lack of thrift in the
working classes, their insufficient attendance
at evening service, their neglect of the
Harvest Festival, and of many other things
that might materially help them to improve
their lot. It was, I think, about this time
that an extraordinary interruption occurred.
An enormous, powerful man, partly con-
cealed with white plaster, arose in the
middle of the hall, and offered (in a loud,
roaring voice, like a bull's) some observa-
tions which seemed to be in a foreign
language. Mr. Raymond Percy, my col-
league, descended to his level by entering
into a duel of repartee, in which he
appeared to be the victor. The meeting
began to behave more respectfully for a
little ; yet before I had said twelve sentences
more the rush was made for the platform.
The enormous plasterer, in particular,
plunged towards us, shaking the earth like
an elephant ; and I really do not know what

246 MANALIVE.

would have happened if a man equally large,
but not quite so ill-dressed, had not jumped
up also and held him away. This other big
man shouted a sort of speech to the mob as
he was shoving them back. I don't know
what he said, but, what with shouting and
shoving and such horseplay, he got us out
at a back door, while the wretched people
went roaring down another passage.

" Then follows the truly extraordinary
part of my story. When he had got us
outside, in a mean backyard of blistered
grass leading into a lane with a very lonely-
looking lamp-post, this giant addressed us as
follows : c You're well out of that, sir ;
now you'd better come along with me. I
want you to help me in an act of social
justice, such as we've all been talking about.
Come along ! ' And turning his big back
abruptly, he led us down the lean old lane
with the one lean old lamp-post, we scarcely
knowing what to do but to follow him.

MANALIVE. 247

He had certainly helped us in a most
difficult situation, and, as a gentleman, I
could not treat such a benefactor with
suspicion without grave grounds. Such also
was the view of my Socialistic colleague,
who (with all his dreadful talk of arbitra-
tion) is a gentleman also. In fact, he comes
of the Staffordshire Percys, a branch of the
old house, and has the black hair and pale,
clear-cut face of the whole family. I
cannot but refer it to vanity that he should
heighten his personal advantages with black
velvet or a red cross of considerable ostenta-
tion, and certainly — but I digress.

" A fog was coming up the street, and
that last lost lamp-post faded behind us in
a way that certainly depressed the mind.
The large man in front of us looked larger
and larger in the haze. He did not turn
round, but he said with his huge back to us,
c All that talking's no good ; we want a little
practical Socialism.'

248 MANALIVE.

" ' I quite agree,' said Percy ; ' but I
always like to understand things in theory
before I put them into practice.'

" ' Oh, you leave it to me,' said the
practical Socialist, or whatever he was, with
the most terrifying vagueness. ' I have a
way with me. I'm a Permeator.'

" I could not imagine what he meant, but
my companion laughed, so I was sufficiently
reassured to continue the unaccountable
journey for the present. It led us through
most singular ways ; out of the lane, where
we were already rather cramped, into a
paved passage, at the end of which we
passed through a wooden gate left open.
We then found ourselves, in the increasing
darkness and vapour, crossing what appeared
to be a beaten path across a kitchen garden.
I called out to the enormous person going
on in front, but he answered obscurely that
it was a short cut.

" I was just repeating my very natural

MANALIVE. 249

doubt to my clerical companion when I was
brought up against a short ladder, apparently
leading to a higher level of road. My
thoughtless colleague ran up it so quickly
that I could not do otherwise than follow as
best I could. The path on which I then
planted my feet was quite unprecedentedly
narrow. I had never had to walk along a
thoroughfare so exiguous. Along one side
of it grew what, in the dark and density of
air, I first took to be some short, strong
thicket of shrubs. Then I saw that they
were not short shrubs ; they were the tops
of tall trees. I, an English gentleman and
clergyman of the Church of England — I
was walking along the top of a garden wall
like a torn cat.

" I am glad to say that I stopped within
my first five steps, and let loose my just rep-
robation, balancing myself as best I could
all the time.

" ' It's a right-of-way,' declared my inde-

250 MANALIVE.

fensible informant. ' It's closed to traffic
once in a hundred years.'

"'Mr. Percy, Mr. Percy!' I called out;
'you are not going on with this black-
guard ? '

" c Why, I think so,' answered my un-
happy colleague flippantly. ' I think you
and I are bigger blackguards than he is,
whatever he is.'

" c I am a burglar,' explained the big
creature quite calmly. ' I am a member of
the Fabian Society. I take back the
wealth stolen by the capitalist, not by
sweeping civil war and revolution, but by
reform fitted to the special occasion — here
a little and there a little. Do you see
that fifth house along the terrace with
the flat roof? I'm permeating that one
to-night.'

" ' Whether this is a crime or a joke,' I
cried, ' I desire to be quit of it.'

" c The ladder is just behind you/ answered

MANALIVE. 251

the creature with horrible courtesy ; ' and,
before you go, do let me give you my
card.'

" If I had had the presence of mind to
show any proper spirit I should have flung
it away, though any adequate gesture of the
kind would have gravely affected my equi-
librium upon the wall. As it was, in the
wildness of the moment, I put it in my waist-
coat pocket, and, picking my way back by
wall and ladder, landed in the respectable
streets once more. Not before, however, I
had seen with my own eyes the two awful
and lamentable facts — that the burglar was
climbing up a slanting roof towards the
chimneys, and that Raymond Percy (a
priest of God and, what was worse, a
gentleman) was crawling up after him. I
have never seen either of them since that
day.

" In consequence of this soul-searching
experience I severed my connection with

252 MANALIVE.

the wild set. I am far from saying that
every member of the Christian Social Union
must necessarily be a burglar. I have no
right to bring any such charge. But it gave
me a hint of what such courses may lead
to in many cases ; and I saw them no more.
" I have only to add that the photograph
you enclose, taken by a Mr. Inglewood, is
undoubtedly that of the burglar in question.
When I got home that night I looked at his
card, and he was inscribed there under the
name of Innocent Smith. — Yours faithfully,
"JOHN CLEMENT HAWKINS."

Moon merely went through the form of
glancing at the paper. He knew that the
prosecutors could not have invented so
heavy a document ; that Moses Gould (for
one) could no more write like a canon than
he could read like one. After handing it
back he rose to open the defence on the
burglary charge.

MANALIVE. 253

" We wish," said Michael, " to give all
reasonable facilities to the prosecution ;
especially as it will save the time of the
whole court. The latter object I shall once
again pursue by passing over all those points
of theory which are so dear to Dr. Pym. I
know how they are made. Perjury is a
variety of aphasia, leading a man to say one
thing instead of another. Forgery is a kind
of writer's cramp, forcing a man to write
his uncle's name instead of his own. Piracy
on the high seas is probably a form of sea-
sickness. But it is unnecessary for us to
inquire into the causes of a fact which we
deny. Innocent Smith never did commit
burglary at all.

" I should like to claim the power per-
mitted by our previous arrangement, and ask
the prosecution two or three questions."

Dr. Cyrus Pym closed his eyes to indicate
a courteous assent.

" In the first place," continued Moon,

254 MANALIVE.

" have you the date of Canon Hawkins's last
glimpse of Smith and Percy climbing up the
walls and roofs ? "

" Ho, yuss ! " called out Gould smartly.
" November thirteen, eighteen ninety-one."

" Have you," continued Moon, "identified
the houses in Hoxton up which they
climbed ? "

" Must have been Ladysmith Terrace out
of the highroad," answered Gould with the
same clockwork readiness.

" Well," said Michael, cocking an eye-
brow at him, " was there any burglary in
that terrace that night ? Surely you could
find that out."

" There may well have been," said the
doctor primly, after a pause, " an unsuccessful
one that led to no legalities."

" Another question," proceeded Michael.
" Canon Hawkins, in his blood-and-thunder
boyish way, left off at the exciting moment.
Why don't you produce the evidence of the

MANALIVE. 255

other clergyman, who actually followed the
burglar and presumably was present at the
crime ? "

Dr. Pym rose and planted the points of
his fingers on the table, as he did when he
was specially confident of the clearness of his
reply.

" We have entirely failed," he said, " to
track the other clergyman, who seems to
have melted into the ether after Canon
Hawkins had seen him as-cending the
gutters and the leads. I am fully aware that
this may strike many as sing'lar ; yet, upon
reflection, I think it will appear pretty
natural to a bright thinker. This Mr.
Raymond Percy is admittedly, by the canon's
evidence, a minister of eccentric ways. His
con-nection with England's proudest and
fairest docs not seemingly prevent a taste for
the society of the real low-down. On the
other hand, the prisoner Smith is, by general
agreement, a man of irr'sistible fascination.

256 MANALIVE.

I entertain no doubt that Smith led the
Reverend Percy into the crime and forced
him to hide his head in the real crim'nal
class. That would fully account for his non-
appearance, and the failure of all attempts to
trace him."

" It is impossible, then, to trace him ? "
asked Moon.

" Impossible," repeated the specialist,
shutting his eyes.

" You are sure it is impossible ? "

"Oh dry up, Michael," cried Gould,
irritably. " We'd 'ave found 'im if we could,
for you bet 'e saw the burglary. Don't you
start looking for 'im. Look for your own
'ead in the dustbin. You'll find that — after
a bit," and his voice died away in grumbling.

" Arthur," directed Michael Moon, sitting
down, "kindly read Mr. Raymond Percy's
letter to the court."

" Wishing, as Mr. Moon has said, to
shorten the proceedings as much as possible,"

MANALIVE. 257

began Lnglewood, " I will not read the first
part of the letter sent to us. It is only fair
to the prosecution to admit the account given
by the second clergyman fully ratifies, as far
as facts are concerned, that given by the first
clergyman. We concede, then, the canon's
story so far as it goes. This must necessarily
be valuable to the prosecutor and also con-
venient to the court. I begin Mr. Percy's
letter, then, at the point when all three men
were standing on the garden wall : —

" As I watched Hawkins wavering on the
wall, I made up my own mind not to waver.
A cloud of wrath was on my brain, like the
cloud of copper fog on the houses and
gardens round. My decision was violent
and simple ; yet the thoughts that led up to
it were so complicated and contradictory
that I could not retrace them now. I knew
Hawkins was a kind, innocent gentleman ;
and I would have given ten pounds for the

258 MANALIVE.

pleasure of kicking him down the road.
That God should allow good people to be as
bestially stupid as that — rose against me like
a towering blasphemy.

"At Oxford, I fear, I had the artistic
temperament rather badly ; and artists love
to be limited. I liked the church as a pretty
pattern ; discipline was mere decoration. I
delighted in mere divisions of time ; I liked
eating fish on Friday. But then I like fish ;
and the fast was made for men who like
meat. Then I came to Hoxton and found
men who had fasted for five hundred years ;
men who had to gnaw fish because they
could not get meat — and fish-bones when
they could not get fish. As too many British
officers treat the army as a review, so I had
treated the Church Militant as if it were the
Church Pageant. Hoxton cures that. Then
I realized that for eighteen hundred years
the Church Militant had been not a pageant,
but a riot — and a suppressed riot There.

MANALIVE. 259

still living patiently in Hoxton, were the
people to whom the tremendous promises
had been made. In the face of that I had
to become revolutionary if I was to continue
to be religious. In Hoxton one cannot be
a conservative without being also an atheist
— and a pessimist. Nobody but the devil
could want to conserve Hoxton.

" On the top of all this comes Hawkins.
If he had cursed all the Hoxton men, ex-
communicated them and told them they
were going to hell, I should have rather
admired him. If he had ordered them all
to be burned in the market-place, I should
still have had that patience that all good
Christians have with the wrongs inflicted on
other people. But there is no priestcraft
about Hawkins — nor any other kind of craft.
He is as perfectly incapable of being a priest
as he is of being a carpenter or a cabman or
a gardener or a plasterer. He is a perfect
gentleman ; that is his complaint. He does

a6o MANALIVE.

not impose his creed, but simply his class.
He never said a word of religion in the
whole of his damnable address. He simply
said all the things his brother, the major,
would have said. A voice from heaven as-
sures me that he has a brother, and that this
brother is a major.

" When this helpless aristocrat had praised
cleanliness in the body and convention in the
soul to people who could hardly keep body
and soul together, the stampede against our
platform began. I took part in his unde-
served rescue, I followed his obscure de-
liverer, until (as I have said) we stood
together on the wall above the dim gardens,
already clouding with fog. Then I looked
at the curate and at the burglar, and decided,
in a spasm of inspiration, that the burglar
was the better man of the two. The burglar
seemed quite as kind and human as the
curate was — and he was also brave and self-
reliant, which the curate was not. I knew

MANALIVE. 261

there was no virtue in the upper class, for I
belong to it myself; I knew there was not
so very much in the lower class, for I had
lived with it a long time. Many old texts
about the despised and persecuted came back
to my mind, and I thought that the saints
might well be hidden in the criminal class.
About the time Hawkins let himself down
the ladder I was crawling up a low, sloping,
blue-slate roof after the large man, who went
leaping in front of me like a gorilla.

" This upward scramble was short, and
we soon found ourselves tramping along a
broad road of flat roofs, broader than many
big thoroughfares, with chimney-pots here
and there that seemed in the haze as bulky
as small forts. The asphyxiation of the fog
seemed to increase the somewhat swollen
and morbid anger under which my brain
and body laboured. The sky and all those
things that are commonly clear seemed over-
powered by sinister spirits. Tall spectres

262 MANALIVE.

with turbans of vapour seemed to stand
higher than sun or moon, eclipsing both. I
thought dimly of illustrations to the 'Arabian
Nights ' on brown paper with rich but
sombre tints, showing genii gathering round
the Seal of Solomon. By the way, what
was the Seal of Solomon ? Nothing to do
with sealing-wax really, I suppose ; but my
muddled fancy felt the thick clouds as being
of that heavy and clinging substance, of
strong opaque colour, poured out of boiling
pots and stamped into monstrous emblems.

" The first effect of the tall turbaned
vapours was that discoloured look of pea-
soup or coffee brown of which Londoners
commonly speak. But the scene grew
subtler with familiarity. We stood above
the average of the housetops and saw some-
thing of that thing called smoke, which in
great cities creates the strange thing called
fog. Beneath us rose a forest of chimney-
pots. And there stood in every chimney-pot,

MANALIVE. 263

as if it were a flower-pot, a brief shrub or a
tall tree of coloured vapour. The colours of
the smoke were various ; for some chimneys
were from firesides and some from factories,
and some again from mere rubbish heaps.
And yet, though the tints were all varied,
they all seemed unnatural, like fumes from
a witch's pot. It was as if the shameful
and ugly shapes growing shapeless in the
cauldron sent up each its separate spurt of
steam, coloured according to the fish or flesh
consumed. Here, aglow from underneath,
were dark red clouds, such as might drift
from dark jars of sacrificial blood ; there the
vapour was dark indigo gray, like the long
hair of witches steeped in the hell-broth.
In another place the smoke was of an awful
opaque ivory yellow, such as might be the
disembodiment of one of their old, leprous,
waxen images. But right across it ran a
line of bright, sinister, sulphurous green, as
clear and crooked as Arabic — "

264 MANALIVE.

Mr. Moses Gould once more attempted
the arrest of the 'bus. He was understood to
suggest that the reader should shorten the
proceedings by leaving out all the adjectives.
Mrs. Duke, who had woken up, observed that
she was sure it was all very nice, and the
decision was duly noted down by Moses
with a blue, and by Michael with a red, pencil.
Inglewood then resumed the reading of the
document.

" Then I read the writing of the smoke.
Smoke was like the modern city that makes
it ; it is not always dull or ugly, but it is
always wicked and vain.

" Modern England was like a cloud of
smoke ; it could carry all colours, but it
could leave nothing but a stain. It was our
weakness and not our strength that put a
rich refuse in the sky. These were the
rivers of our vanity pouring into the void.
We had taken the sacred circle of the

MANALIVE. 265

whirlwind, and looked down on it, and seen
it as a whirlpool. And then we had used it
as a sink. It was a good symbol of the
mutiny in my own mind. Only our worst
things were going to heaven. Only our
criminals could still ascend like angels.

" As my brain was blinded with such
emotions, my guide stopped by one of the
big chimney-pots that stood at regular in-
tervals like lamp-posts along that uplifted and
aerial highway. He put his heavy hand
upon it, and for the moment I thought he
was merely leaning on it, tired with his
steep scramble and long tramp along the top
of the terrace. So far as I could guess from
the abysses, full of fog on either side, and
the veiled lights of red brown and old gold
glowing through them now and again, we
were on the top of one of those long, con-
secutive, and genteel rows of houses which
are still to be found lifting their heads above

poorer districts, the remains of some rage
9a

266 MANALIVE.

of optimism in earlier speculative builders.
Probably enough, they were entirely un-
tenanted, or tenanted only by such small
clans of the poor as gather also in the old
emptied palaces of Italy. Indeed, some time
later, when the fog had lifted a little, I dis-
covered that we were walking round a semi-
circle of crescent which fell away below us
into one flat square or wide street below an-
other, like a giant stairway, in a manner not
unknown in the eccentric building of London,
and looking like the last ledges of the land.
But a cloud sealed the giant stairway as yet.
" My speculations about the sullen sky-
scape, however, were interrupted by some-
thing as unexpected as the moon fallen from
the sky. Instead of my burglar lifting his
hand from the chimney he leaned on, he
leaned on it a little more heavily, and the
whole chimney-pot turned over like the
opening top of an inkstand. I remembered
the short ladder leaning against the low

MANALIVE. 267

wall, and felt sure he had arranged his
criminal approach long before.

" The collapse of the big . chimney-pot
ought to have been the culmination of my
chaotic feelings ; but, to tell the truth, it
produced a sudden sense of comedy and even
of comfort. I could not recall what con-
nected this abrupt bit of housebreaking with
some quaint but still kindly fancies. Then
I remembered the delightful and uproarious
scenes of roofs and chimneys in the harlequi-
nades of my childhood, and was darkly and
quite irrationally comforted by a sense of
unsubstantiality in the scene, as if the
houses were of lath and paint and paste-
board, and were only meant to be tumbled
in and out of by policemen and pantaloons.
The law-breaking of my companion seemed
not only seriously excusable, but even comic-
ally excusable. Who were all these pompous
preposterous people with their footmen and
their foot-scrapers, their chimney-pots and

268 MANALIVE.

their chimney-pot hats, that they should pre-
vent a poor clown from getting sausages if he
wanted them ? One would suppose that
property was a serious thing. I had reached,
as it were, a higher level of that mountain
of vaporous visions, the heaven of a higher
levity.

" My guide had jumped down into the
dark cavity revealed by the displaced chim-
ney-pot. He must have landed at a level
considerably lower, for, tall as he was, nothing
but his weirdly tousled head remained visible.
Something again far off, and yet familiar,
pleased me about this way of invading the
houses of men. I thought of little chimney-
sweeps, and ' The Water Babies ; ' but I
decided that it was not that. Then I re-
membered what it was that made me
connect such topsy-turvy trespass with ideas
quite opposite to the idea of crime. Christ-
mas Eve, of course, and Santa Claus coming
down the chimney.

MANALIVE. 269

" Almost at the same instant the hairy head
disappeared into the black hole ; but I heard
a voice calling to me from below. A second
or two afterwards, the hairy head reappeared ;
it was dark against the more fiery part of
the fog, and nothing could be spelt of its
expression, but its voice called on me to
follow with that enthusiastic impatience,
proper only among old friends. I jumped
into the gulf, and as blindly as Curtius, for
I was still thinking of Santa Claus and the
traditional virtue of such vertical entrance.

" In every well-appointed gentleman's
house, I reflected, there was the front door for
the gentlemen, and the side door for the trades-
men ; but there was also the top door for
the gods. The chimney is, so to speak,
the underground passage between earth and
heaven. By this starry tunnel Santa Claus
manages — like the skylark — to be true to
the kindred points of heaven and home.
Nay, owing to certain conventions, and a

270 MANALIVE.

widely distributed lack of courage for climb-
ing, this door was, perhaps, little used.
But Santa Claus's door was really the front
door : it was the door fronting the universe.

" I thought this as I groped my way across
the black garret, or loft below the roof, and
scrambled down the squat ladder that let us
down into a yet larger loft below. Yet it
was not till I was half-way down the ladder
that I suddenly stood still, and thought for
an instant of retracing all my steps, as my
companion had retraced them from the
beginning of the garden wall. The name
of Santa Claus had suddenly brought me
back to my senses. I remembered why
Santa Claus came, and why he was welcome.

" I was brought up in the propertied
classes, and with all their horror of offences
against property. I had heard all the regular
denunciations of robbery, both right and
wrong ; I had read the Ten Commandments
in church a thousand times. And then and

MANALIVE. 271

there, at the age of thirty-four, half-way
down a ladder in a dark room in the bodily
act of burglary, I saw suddenly for the first
time that theft, after all, is really wrong.

" It was too late to turn back, however,
and I followed the strangely soft footsteps
of my huge companion across the lower and
larger loft, till he knelt down on a part of the
bare flooring and, after a few fumbling efforts,
lifted a sort of trapdoor. This released a
light from below, and we found ourselves
looking down into a lamp-lit sitting-room,
of the sort that in large houses often leads
out of a bedroom, and is an adjunct to it.
Light thus breaking from beneath our feet
like a soundless explosion, showed that the
trapdoor just lifted was clogged with dust
and rust, and had doubtless been long dis-
used until the advent of my enterprising
friend. But I did not look at this long, for
the sight of the shining room underneath us
had an almost unnatural attractiveness. To

272 MANALIVE.

enter a modern interior at so strange an
angle, by so forgotten a door, was an epoch
in one's psychology. It was like having
found a fourth dimension.

" My companion dropped from the aper-
ture into the room so suddenly and sound-
lessly, that I could do nothing but follow
him ; though, through lack of practice in
crime, I was by no means soundless. Before
the echo of my boots had died away, the big
burglar had gone quickly to the door, half
opened it, and stood looking down the stair-
case and listening. Then, leaving the door
still half open, he came back into the middle
of the room, and ran his roving blue eye
round its furniture and ornament. The
room was comfortably lined with books in
that rich and human way that makes the
walls seem alive ; it was a deep and full, but
slovenly, bookcase, of the sort that is con-
stantly ransacked for the purposes of reading
in bed. One of those stunted German stoves

MANALIVE. 273

that look like red goblins stood in a corner,
and a sideboard of walnut wood with closed
doors in its lower part. There were three
windows, high but narrow. After another
glance round, my housebreaker plucked the
walnut doors open and rummaged inside.
He found nothing there, apparently, except
an extremely handsome cut-glass decanter,
containing what looked like port. Somehow
the sight of the thief returning with this
ridiculous little luxury in his hand woke
within me once more all the revelation and
revulsion I had felt above.

" c Don't do it ! ' I cried quite incoherently.
4 Santa Claus — '

" ' Ah,' said the burglar, as he put the
decanter on the table and stood looking at
me, * you've thought about that, too.'

" ' I can't express a millionth part of what
I've thought of,' I cried, ' but it's something
like this . . . oh, can't you see k ? Why
are children not afraid of Santa Claus, though

274 MANALIVE.

he comes like a thief in the night ? He is
permitted secrecy, trespass, almost treach-
ery— because there are more toys where he
has been. What should we feel if there
were less ? Down what chimney from hell
would come the goblin that should take
away the children's balls and dolls while they
slept ? Could a Greek tragedy be more gray
and cruel than that daybreak and awakening ?
Dog-stealer, horse-stealer, man-stealer — can
you think of anything so base as a toy-
stealer ? '

" The burglar, as if absently, took a large
revolver from his pocket and laid it on the
table beside the decanter, but still kept his
blue reflective eyes fixed on my face.

" c Man ! ' I said, ' all stealing is toy-stealing.
That's why it's really wrong. The goods of
the unhappy children of men should be re-
spected because of their worthlessness. I
know Naboth's vineyard is as painted as
Noah's Ark. I know Nathan's ewe-lamb is

MANALIVE. 275

really a woolly baa-lamb on a wooden stand.
That is why I could not take them away.
I did not mind so much, as long as I thought
of men's things as their valuables ; but I dare
not put a hand upon their vanities.'

" After a moment I added abruptly, c Only
saints and sages ought to be robbed. They
may be stripped and pillaged ; but not the
poor little worldly people of the things that
are their poor little pride.'

" He set out two wineglasses from the
cupboard, rilled them both, and lifted one
of them with a salutation towards his lips.

" ' Don't do it ! ' I cried. * It might be
the last bottle of some rotten vintage or
other. The master of this house may be
proud of it. Don't you see there's something
sacred in the silliness of such things ? '

" c It's not the last bottle,' answered my
criminal calmly ; £ there's plenty more in the
cellar.'

" ' You know the house, then ? ' I said.

276 MANALIVE.

" ' Too well,' he answered, with a sadness
so strange as to have something eerie about
it. ' I am always trying to forget what I
know — and to find what I don't know.'
He drained his glass. ' Besides,' he added,
' it will do him good.'

" « What will do him good ? '

" ' The wine I'm drinking,' said the strange
person.

" c Does he drink too much, then ? ' I
inquired.

" ' No,' he answered ; ' not unless I do.'

" ' Do you mean,' I demanded, ' that the
owner of this house approves of all you do ? '

" ' God forbid,' he answered ; c but he has
to do the same.'

" The dead face of the fog looking in at all
the three windows unreasonably increased a
sense of riddle, and even terror, about this
tall, narrow house we had entered out of the
sky. I had once more the notion about the
gigantic genii — I fancied that enormous

MANALIVE. 277

Egyptian faces, of the dead reds and yellows
of Egypt, were staring in at each window
of our little lamp-lit room as at a lighted
stage of marionettes. My companion went
on playing with the pistol in front of him,
and talking with the same rather creepy
confidentialness.

" ' I am always trying to find him — to
catch him unawares. I come in through
skylights and trapdoors to find him ; but
whenever I find him — he is doing what I
am doing.'

" I sprang to my feet with a thrill of fear.
1 There is some one coming,' I cried, and
my cry had something of a shriek in it.

" Not from the stairs below, but along the
passage from the inner bedchamber (which
seemed somehow to make it more alarming),
footsteps were coming nearer. I am quite
unable to say what mystery, or monster, or
double, I expected to see when the door was
pushed open from within. I am only quite

278 MANALIVE.

certain that I did not expect to see what I
did see.

" Framed in the open doorway stood, with
an air of great serenity, a rather tall young
woman, definitely though indefinably artistic
— her dress the colour of spring and her hair
of autumn leaves, with a face which, though
still comparatively young, conveyed experi-
ence as well as intelligence. All she said
was, ' I didn't hear you come in.'

" ' I came in another way,' said the Per-
meator, somewhat vaguely. ' I'd left my
latchkey at home.'

" I got to my feet in a mixture of polite-
ness and mania. ' I'm really very sorry/ I
cried. ' I know my position is irregular.
Would you be so obliging as to tell me
whose house this is ? '

" ' Mine,' said the burglar. ' May I present
you to my wife ? '

" I doubtfully, and somewhat slowly, re-
sumed my seat ; and I did not get out of it

MANALIVE. 279

till nearly morning. Mrs. Smith (such was
the prosaic name of this far from prosaic
household) lingered a little, talking slightly
and pleasantly. She left on my mind the
impression of a certain odd mixture of shy-
ness and sharpness ; as if she knew the world
well, but was still a little harmlessly afraid
of it. Perhaps the possession of so jumpy
and incalculable a husband had left her a
little nervous. Anyhow, when she had re-
tired to the inner chamber once more, that
extraordinary man poured forth his apologia
and autobiography over the dwindling wine.
" He had been sent to Cambridge with a
view to a mathematical and scientific, rather
than a classical or literary, career. A starless
nihilism was then the philosophy of the
schools ; and it bred in him a war between
the members and the spirit, but one in which
the members were right. While his brain
accepted the black creed, his very body
rebelled against it. As he put it, his right

280 MANALIVE.

hand taught him terrible things. As the
authorities of Cambridge University put it,
unfortunately, it had taken the form of his
right hand flourishing a loaded firearm in the
very face of a distinguished don, and driving
him to climb out of the window and cling
to a waterspout. He had done it solely
because the poor don had professed in theory
a preference for non-existence. For this
very unacademic type of argument he had
been sent down. Vomiting as he was with
revulsion, from the pessimism that had
quailed under his pistol, he made himself a
kind of fanatic of the joy of life. He cut
across all the associations of serious-minded
men. He was gay, but by no means careless.
His practical jokes were more in earnest
than verbal ones. Though not an optimist
in the absurd sense of maintaining that life
is all beer and skittles, he did really seem to
maintain that beer and skittles are the most
serious part of it. ' What is more im-

MANALIVE. 281

mortal,' he would cry, ' than love and war ?
Type of all desire and joy — beer. Type of
all battle and conquest — skittles.'

" There was something in him of what the
old world called the solemnity of revels —
when they spoke of c solemnizing ' a mere
masquerade or wedding banquet. Neverthe-
less, he was not a mere pagan any more than
he was a mere practical joker. His eccen-
tricities sprang from a static fact of faith,
in itself mystical, and even childlike and
Christian.

" ' I don't deny,' he said, c that there
should be priests to remind men that they
will one day die. I only say that at certain
strange epochs it is necessary to have another
kind of priests, called poets, actually to
remind men that they are not dead yet.
The intellectuals among whom I moved
were not even alive enough to fear death.
They hadn't blood enough in them to be
cowards. Until a pistol barrel was poked

282 MANALIVE.

under their very noses they never even knew
they had been born. For ages looking up
an eternal perspective it might be true that
life is a learning to die. But for these little
white rats it was just as true that death was
their only chance of learning to live.'

" His creed of wonder was Christian by
this absolute test ; that he felt it continually
slipping from himself as much as from
others. He had the same pistol for himself,
as Brutus said of the dagger. He continually
ran preposterous risks of high precipice or
headlong speed to keep alive the mere
conviction that he was alive. He treasured
up trivial and yet insane details that had
once reminded him of the awful subconscious
reality. When the don had hung on the
stone gutter, the sight of his long dangling
legs, vibrating in the void like wings, some-
how awoke the naked satire of the old
definition of man as a two-legged animal
without feathers. The wretched professor

MANALIVE. 283

had been brought into peril by his head,
which he had so elaborately cultivated, and
only saved by his legs, which he had treated
with coldness and neglect. Smith could
think of no other way of announcing or
recording this, except to send a telegram
to an old school friend (by this time a total
stranger) to say that he had just seen a man
with two legs ; and that the man was alive.
" The uprush of his released optimism
burst into stars like a rocket when he suddenly
fell in love. He happened to be shooting
a high and very headlong weir in a canoe,
by way of proving to himself that he was
alive ; and he soon found himself involved
in some doubt about the continuance of the
fact. What was worse, he found he had
equally jeopardized a harmless lady alone in
a rowing-boat, and one who had provoked
death by no professions of philosophic nega-
tion. He apologized in wild gasps through
all his wild wet labours to bring her to the

284 MANALIVE.

shore, and when he had done so at last, he
seems to have proposed to her on the bank.
Anyhow, with the same impetuosity with
which he had nearly murdered her, he
completely married her ; and she was the
lady in green to whom I had recently said
'good-night.'

" They had settled down in these high
narrow houses near Highbury. Perhaps,
indeed, that is hardly the word. One could
strictly say that Smith was married, that
he was very happily married, that he not
only did not care for any woman but his
wife, but did not seem to care for any place
but his home ; but perhaps one could hardly
say that he had settled down. ' I am a
very domestic fellow,' he explained with
gravity, c and I have often come in through
a broken window rather than be late for
tea.'

" He lashed his soul with laughter to
prevent it falling asleep. He lost his wife

MANALIVE. 285

a series of excellent servants by knocking
at the door as a total stranger, and asking
if Mr. Smith lived there and what kind
of a man he was. The London general
servant is not used to the master indulging
in such transcendental ironies. And it was
found impossible to explain to her that he
did it in order to feel the same interest in
his own affairs that he always felt in other
people's.

" ' I know there's a fellow called Smith,'
he said in his rather weird way, ' living
in one of the tall houses in this terrace. I
know he is really happy, and yet I can never
catch him at it.'

" Sometimes he would, of a sudden, treat
his wife with a kind of paralyzed politeness,
like a young stranger struck with love at
first sight. Sometimes he would extend this
poetic fear to the very furniture ; would
seem to apologize to the chair he sat on, and
climb the staircase as cautiously as a crags-

286 MANALIVE.

man, to renew in himself the sense of their
skeleton of reality. Every stair is a ladder
and every stool a leg, he said. And at other
times he would play the stranger exactly
in the opposite sense, and would enter by
another way, so as to feel like a thief and
a robber. He would break and violate his
own home, as he had done with me that
night. It was nearly morning before I
could tear myself from this queer confidence
of the Man Who Would Not Die, and as I
shook hands with him on the doorstep the
last load of fog was lifting, and rifts of day-
light revealed the stairway of irregular street
levels that looked like the end of the world.
" It will be enough for many to say that
I had passed a night with a maniac. What
other term, it will be said, could be applied
to such a being ? A man who reminds
himself that he is married by pretending not
to be married ! A man who tries to covet
his own goods instead of his neighbour's !

MANALIVE. 287

On this I have but one word to say, and
I feel it of my honour to say it, though
no one understands. I believe the maniac
was one of those who do not merely come,
but are sent ; sent like a great gale upon
ships by Him who made His angels winds
and His messengers a flaming fire. This, at
least, I know for certain. Whether such
men have laughed or wept, we have laughed
at their laughter as much as at their weeping.
Whether they cursed or blessed the world,
they have never fitted it. It is true that
men have shrunk from the sting of a great
satirist as if from the sting of an adder.
But it is equally true that men flee from
the embrace of a great optimist as from the
embrace of a bear. Nothing brings down
more curses than a real benediction. For
the goodness of good things, like the badness
of bad things, is a prodigy past speech ; it
is to be pictured rather than spoken. We
shall have gone deeper than the deeps of

288 MANALIVE.

heaven and grown older than the oldest
angels before we feel, even in its first faint
vibrations, the everlasting violence of that
double passion with which God hates and
loves the world. — I am, yours faithfully,
" RAYMOND PERCY."

" Oh, 'oly, 'oly, 'oly ! " said Mr. Moses
Gould.

The instant he had spoken all the rest
knew they had been in an almost religious
state of submission and assent. Something
had bound them all together ; something in
the sacred tradition of the last two words
of the letter ; something also in the touching
and boyish embarrassment with which Ingle-
wood had read them — for he had 'all the
thin - skinned reverence of the agnostic.
Moses Gould was as good a fellow in his
way as ever lived ; far kinder to his family
than more refined men of pleasure, simple
and steadfast in his admirations, a thoroughly

MANALIVE. 289

wholesome animal and a thoroughly genuine
character. But wherever there is conflict,
crises come in which any soul, personal or
racial, unconsciously turns on the world the
most hateful of its hundred faces. English
reverence, Irish mysticism, American idealism,
looked up and saw on the face of Moses a
certain smile. It was that smile of the
Cynic Triumphant, which has been the
tocsin for many a cruel riot in Russian vil-
lages or mediaeval towns.

" Oh, 'oly, 'oly, 'oly ! " said Moses
Gould.

Finding that this was not well received,
he explained further, exuberance deepening
on his dark exuberant features.

" Always fun to see a bloke swallow a
wasp when 'e's corfin' up a fly," he said
pleasantly. " Don't you see you've bunged
up old Smith anyhow. If this parson's
tale's O.K. — why, Smith is 'ot. 'E's pretty
'ot. We find him elopin' with Miss Gray

10

290 MANALIVE.

(best respects !) in a cab. Well, what abart
this Mrs. Smith the curate talks of, with
her blarsted shyness — transmigogrified into
a blighted sharpness ? Miss Gray ain't been
very sharp, but I reckon she'll be pretty shy."

" Don't be a brute," growled Michael
Moon.

None could lift their eyes to look at
Mary ; but Inglewood sent a glance along
the table at Innocent Smith. He was still
bowed above his paper toys, and a wrinkle
was on his forehead that might have been
worry or shame. He carefully plucked out
one corner of a complicated paper ship and
tucked it in elsewhere ; then the wrinkle
vanished and he looked relieved.

Chapter III.

THE ROUND ROAD ; OR, THE
DESERTION CHARGE.

DYM rose with sincere embarrassment ; for
he was an American, and his respect
for ladies was real, and not at all scientific.

" Ignoring," he said, " the delicate and
considerably knightly protests that have been
called forth by my colleague's native sense
of oration, and apologizing to all for whom
our wild search for truth seems unsuitable
to the grand ruins of a feudal land, I still
think my colleague's question by no means
devoid of rel'vancy. The last charge against
the accused was one of burglary ; the next
charge on the paper is of bigamy and de-
sertion. It does without question appear

292 MANALIVE.

that the defence, in aspiring to rebut the
last charge, have really admitted the next.
Either Innocent Smith is still under a
charge of attempted burglary, or else that is
exploded ; but he is pretty well fixed for
attempted bigamy. It all depends what
view we take of the alleged letter from
Curate Percy. Under these conditions I feel
justified in claiming my right to questions.
May I ask how the defence got hold of the
letter from Curate Percy ? Did it come
direct from the prisoner ? "

" We have had nothing direct from the
prisoner," said Moon quietly. " The few
documents which the defence guarantees
came to us from another quarter."

" From what quarter? " asked Dr. Pym.

" If you insist," answered Moon, " we
had them from Miss Gray."

Dr. Cyrus Pym quite forgot to close his
eyes, and, instead, opened them very wide.

" Do you really mean to say," he said,

MANALIVE. 293

" that Miss Gray was in possession of this
document testifying to a previous Mrs.
Smith ? "

" Quite so," said Inglewood, and sat
down.

The doctor said something about infatua-
tion in a low and painful voice, and then
with visible difficulty continued his opening
remarks.

" Unfortunately the tragic truth revealed
by Curate Percy's narrative is only too
crushingly confirmed by other and shocking
documents in our own possession. Of these
the principal and most certain is the testi-
mony of Innocent Smith's gardener, who
was present at the most dramatic and eye-
opening of his many acts of marital infidelity.
Mr. Gould, the gardener, please."

Mr. Gould, with his tireless cheerfulness,
arose to present the gardener. That func-
tionary explained that he had served Mr. and
Mrs. Innocent Smith when they had a little

294 MANALIVE.

house on the edge of Croydon. From the
gardener's tale, with its many small allusions,
Inglewood grew certain that he had seen the
place. It was one of those corners of town
or country that one does not forget, for it
looked like a frontier. The garden hung
very high above the lane, and its end was
steep and sharp, like a fortress. Beyond
was a roll of real country, with a white path
sprawling across it, and the roots, boles, and
branches of great gray trees writhing and
twisting against the sky. But as if to assert
that the lane itself was suburban, were
sharply relieved against that gray and tossing
upland a lamp-post painted a peculiar yellow-
green and a red pillar-box that stood exactly
at the corner. Inglewood was sure of the
place ; he had passed it twenty times in his
constitutionals on the bicycle; he had
always dimly felt it was a place where some-
thing might occur. But it gave him quite
a shiver to feel that the face of his frightful

MANALIVE. 2997

friend or enemy Smith might at any time
have appeared over the garden bushes above.
The gardener's account, unlike the curate's,
was quite free from decorative adjectives,
however many he may have uttered privately
while writing it. He simply said that on
a particular morning Mr. Smith came out
and began to play about with a rake, as
he often did. Sometimes he would tickle
the nose of his eldest child (he had two chil-
dren) ; sometimes he would hook the rake
on to the branch of a tree, and hoist him-
self up with horrible gymnastic jerks, like
those of a giant frog in its final agony.
Never, apparently, did he think of putting
the rake to any of its proper uses, and the
gardener, in consequence, treated his actions
with coldness and brevity. But the gardener
was certain that on one particular morning
in October he (the gardener) had come
round the corner of the house carrying the
hose, had seen Mr. Smith standing on the

c96 MANALIVE.

lawn in a striped red and white jacket
(which might have been his smoking jacket,
but was quite as like a part of his pyjamas),
and had heard him then and there call out
to his wife, who was looking out of the
bedroom window on to the garden, these
decisive and very loud expressions —

" I won't stay here any longer. I've got
another wife and much better children a
long way from here. My other wife's got
redder hair than yours, and my other
garden's got a much finer situation ; and I'm
going off to them."

With these words, apparently, he sent the
rake flying far up into the sky, higher than
many could have shot an arrow, and caught
it again. Then he cleared the hedge at a
leap, and alighted on his feet down in the
lane below, and set off up the road without
even a hat. Much of the picture was
doubtless supplied by Inglewood's accidental
memory of the place. He could see with his

MANALIVE. 297

mind's eye that big bare-headed figure with
the ragged rake swaggering up the crooked
woodland road, and leaving lamp-post and
pillar-box behind. But the gardener, on his
own account, was quite prepared to swear to
the public confession of bigamy, to the
temporary disappearance of the rake in the
sky, and the final disappearance of the man
up the road. Moreover, being a local man,
he could swear that, beyond some local
rumours that Smith had embarked on the
south-eastern coast, nothing was known of
him again.

This impression was somewhat curiously
clinched by Michael Moon in the few but
clear phrases in which he opened the de-
fence upon the third charge. So far from
denying that Smith had fled from Croydon
and disappeared upon the Continent, he
seemed prepared to prove all this on his own
account. " I hope you are not so insular,"
he said, " that you will not respect the word

10 a

z98 MANALIVE.

of a French innkeeper as much as that of
an English gardener. By Mr Inglewood's
favour we will hear the French innkeeper."

Before the company had decided the
delicate point Inglewood was already reading
out the account in question. It was in
French. It seemed to them to run some-
thing like this : —

" SIR, — Yes ; I am Durobin of Durobin's
Cafe on the sea-front at Gras, rather north of
Dunquerque. I am willing to write all I
know of the stranger out of the sea.

" I have no sympathy with eccentrics or
poets. A man of sense looks for beauty in
things deliberately intended to be beautiful,
such as a trim flower-bed or an ivory
statuette. One does not permit beauty to
pervade one's whole life, just as one does not
pave all the roads with ivory or cover all the
fields with geraniums. My faith, but we
should miss the onions !

MANALIVE. 299

" But whether I read things backwards
through my memory, or whether there are
indeed atmospheres of psychology which the
eye of science cannot as yet pierce, it is the
humiliating fact that on that particular
evening I felt like a poet — like any little
rascal of a poet who drinks absinthe in the
mad Montmartre.

" Positively the sea itself looked like
absinthe, green and bitter and poisonous. I
had never known it look unfamiliar before.
In the sky was that early and stormy dark-
ness that is so depressing to the mind, and
the wind blew shrilly round the little
lonely coloured kiosk where they sell the
newspapers, and along the sand-hills by the
shore. Then I saw a fishing-boat with a
brown sail standing in silently from the sea.
It was already quite close, and out of it
clambered a man of monstrous stature, who
came wading to shore with the water not up
to his knees, though it would have reached

300 MANALIVE.

the hips of many men. He leaned on a
long rake or forked pole, which looked like
a trident, and made him look like a Triton.
Wet as he was, and with strips of seaweed
clinging to him, he walked across to my
cafe, and, sitting down at a table outside,
asked for cherry brandy, a liqueur which I
keep, but is seldom demanded. Then the
monster, with great politeness, invited me to
partake of a vermouth before my dinner,
and we fell into conversation. He had
apparently crossed from Kent by a small
boat got at a private bargain because of
some odd fancy he had for passing promptly
in an easterly direction, and not waiting for
any of the official boats. He was, he some-
what vaguely explained, looking for a house.
When I naturally asked where the house
was, he answered that he did not know : it
was on an island ; it was somewhere to the
east ; or, as he expressed it with a hazy and
yet impatient gesture, ' over there.'

MANALIVE. 301

" I asked him how, if he did not know
the place, he would know it when he saw
it. Here he suddenly ceased to be hazy,
and became alarmingly minute. He gave a
description of the house detailed enough for
an auctioneer. I have forgotten nearly all
the details except the last two, which were
that the lamp-post was painted green, and
that there was a red pillar-box at the corner.

" ' A red pillar-box ! ' I cried in astonish-
ment. ' Why, the place must be in
England ! '

" ' I had forgotten,' he said, nodding
heavily. * That is the island's name.'

" ' But, nom du nom, I cried testily,
' you've just come from England, my boy.'

" * They said it was England,' said my
imbecile, conspiratorally. ' They said it was
Kent. But those Kentish men are such
liars one can't believe anything they say.'

" ' Monsieur,' I said, ' you must pardon
me. I am elderly, and the fumisteries of

302 MANALIVE.

the young men are beyond me. I go by
common sense or, at the largest, by that
extension of applied common sense called
science.'

" ' Science ! ' cried the stranger. £ There is
only one good thing science ever discovered
— a good thing, good tidings of great joy
— that the world is round.'

"f told him with civility that his words
conveyed no impression to my intelligence.
' I mean,' he said, c that going right round
the world is the shortest way to where you
are already.'

" ' Is it not even shorter,' I asked, ' to
stop where you are ? '

" ' No, no, no ! ' he cried emphatically.
c That way is very long and very weary.
At the end of the world, at the back of the
dawn, I shall find the wife I really married
and the house that is really mine. And that
house will have a greener lamp-post and a
redder pillar-box. Do you,' he asked with

MANALIVE. 303

a sudden intensity, ' do you never want
to rush out of your house in order to
find it ? '

" c No, I think not,' I replied ; £ reason tells
a man from the first to adapt his desires to
the probable supply of life. I remain here,
content to fulfil the life of man. All my
interests are here, and most of my friends,
and—'

" ' And yet,' he cried, starting to his almost
terrific height, £ you made the French
Revolution ! '

" c Pardon me,' I said, ' I am not quite so
elderly. A relative perhaps.'

" c I mean your sort did ! ' exclaimed this
personage. ' Yes, your damned smug, settled,
sensible sort made the French Revolution.
Oh ! I know some say it was no good, and
you're just back where you were before.
Why, blast it all, that's just where we all
want to be — back where we were before !
That is revolution — going right round

304 MANALIVE.

_Every^j-evplution, like every repentance, is

" He was so excited that I waited till he had
taken his seat again, and then said something
indifferent and soothing ; but he struck the
tiny table with his colossal fist and went on.

" ' I am going to have a revolution, not
a French Revolution, but an English Revolu-
tion. God has given to each tribe its own
type of mutiny. The Frenchmen march
against the citadel of the city together ; the
Englishman marches to the outskirts of the
city, and alone. But I am going to turn
the world upside down too. I'm going to
turn myself upside down. I'm going to
walk upside down in the cursed upsidedown-
land of the Antipodes, where trees and men
hang head downward in the sky. *\But my
revolution, like yours, like the earth's, will
end up in the holy, happy place — the celestial,
incredible place — the place where we were
before?)

MANALIVE. 305

"With these remarks, which can scarcely
be reconciled with reason, he leapt from the
seat and strode away into the twilight,
swinging his pole and leaving behind him an
excessive payment, which also pointed to
some loss of mental balance. This is all
I know of the episode of the man landed
from the fishing-boat, and I hope it may
serve the interests of justice. — Accept, Sir,
the assurances of the very high considera-
tion, with which I have the honour to
be your obedient servant,

" JULES DUROBIN."

" The next document in our dossier,"
continued Inglewood, "comes from the
town of Crazok, in the central plains of
Russia, and runs as follows : —

" SIR, — My name is Paul Nickolaiovitch :
I am the stationmaster at the station near
Crazok. The great trains go by across the

306 MANALIVE.

plains taking people to China, but very few
people get down at the platform where I
have to watch. This makes my life rather
lonely, and I am thrown back much upon
the books I have. But I cannot discuss
these very much with my neighbours, for
enlightened ideas have not spread in this
part of Russia so much as in other 'parts.
Many of the peasants round here have never
heard of Bernard Shaw.

" I am a Liberal, and do my best to spread
Liberal ideas ; but since the failure of the
revolution this has been even more difficult.
The revolutionists committed many acts
contrary to the pure principles of humani-
tarianism, with which indeed, owing to the
scarcity of books, they were ill acquainted.
I did not approve of these cruel acts, though
provoked by the tyranny of the government ;
but now there is a tendency to reproach all
Intelligents with the memory of them. This
is very unfortunate for Intelligents.

MANALIVE. 307

" It was when the railway strike was almost
over, and a few trains came through at long
intervals, that I stood one day watching a
train that had come in. Only one person got
out of the train, far away up at the other end
of it, for it was a very long train. It was
evening, with a cold, greenish sky. A little
snow had fallen, but not enough to whiten
the plain, which stretched away a sort of
sad purple in all directions, save where
the flat tops of some distant tablelands
caught the evening light like lakes. As
the solitary man came stamping along on
the thin snow by the train he grew larger
and larger ; I thought I had never seen so
large a man. But he looked even taller
than he was, I think, because his shoulders
were very big and his head comparatively
little. From the big shoulders hung a
tattered old jacket, striped dull red and
dirty white, very thin for the winter,
and one hand rested on a huge pole such

308 MANALIVE.

as peasants rake in weeds with to burn
them.

" Before he had traversed the full length
of the train he was entangled in one of those
knots of rowdies that were the embers of the
extinct revolution, though they mostly dis-
graced themselves upon the government side.
I was just moving to his assistance, when he
whirled up his rake and laid out to left and
right with such energy that he came through
them without scathe and strode right up
to me, leaving them staggered and really
astonished.

" Yet when he reached me, after so abrupt
an assertion of his aim, he could only say
rather dubiously in French that he wanted
a house.

" ' There are not many houses to be had
round here,' I answered in the same language,
' the district has been very disturbed. A
revolution, as you know, has recently been
suppressed. Any further building — '

MANALIVE. 309

" ' Oh ! I don't mean that,' he cried ;
' I mean a real house — a live house. It
realty is a hyjELhowscT' for it runs away
from me.'

"I am ashamed to say that something in
his phrase or gesture moved me profoundly.
We Russians are brought up in an atmosphere
of folk-lore, and its unfortunate effects can
still be seen in the bright colours of the
children's dolls and of the ikons. For an
instant the idea of a house running away from
a man gave me pleasure, for the enlighten-
ment of man moves slowly.

"'Have you no other house of your
own ? ' I asked.

" ' I have left it,' he said very sadly. * It
was not the house that grew dull, but I that
grew dull in it. My wife was better than
all women, and yet I could not feel it.'

" ' And so,' I said with sympathy, * you
walked straight out of the front door, like a
masculine Nora.'

310 MANALIVE.

" ' Nora ? ' he inquired politely, appar-
ently supposing it to be a Russian word.

'"I mean Nora in The Doll's House,'
I replied.

"At this he looked very much astonished,
and I knew he was an Englishman ; for
Englishmen always think that Russians study
nothing but 'ukases.'

" c The Doll's House ! ' he cried vehemently ;
' why, that is just where Ibsen was so wrong !
Why, the whole aim of a house is to be
a doll's house. Don't you remember, when
you were a child, how those little windows
were windows, while the big windows
weren't. A child has a doll's house, and
shrieks when a front door opens inwards. A
banker has a real house, yet how numerous
are the bankers who fail to emit the faintest
shriek when their real front doors open
inwards.'

" Something from the folk-lore of my
infancy still kept me foolishly silent ; and

MAN ALIVE. 311

before I could speak, the Englishman had
leaned over and was saying in a sort of loud
whisper, c I have found out how to make a
big thing small. I have found out how to
turn a house into a doll's house. Get a long
way off it iGocMets us turn all_things into
toys by his great gift of distance. Once let
me see my old brfcTc^ous"e~Ttairding up quite
little against the horizon, and I shaft1 want to
go back to it again. I shall see the funny
little toy lamp-post painted green outside
the gate, and all the dear little people like
dolls looking out of the window. For the
windows, really open in my doll's house.'

' "But why ? ' I asked, 'should you wish
to return to that particular doll's house ?
Having taken, like Nora, the bold step
against convention, having made yourself in
the conventional sense disreputable, having
dared to be free, why should you not take
advantage of your freedom ? As the greatest
modern writers have pointed out, what you

3J 2 MANALIVE.

called your marriage was only your mood.
You have a right to leave it all behind, like
the clippings of your hair or the parings of
y.our nails. Having once -escaped, you have
the world before you. Though the words
may seem strange to you, you are free in
Russia.'

" He sat with his dreamy eyes on the dark
circles of the plains, where the only moving
thing was the long and labouring trail of
smoke out of the railway engine, violet
in tint, volcanic in outline, the one hot and
heavy cloud of that cold clear evening of
pale green.

" ' Yes,' he said with a huge sigh, ' I am
free in Russia. You are right. I could really
walk into that town over there and have love
all over again, and perhaps marry some
beautiful woman and begin again, and nobody
could ever find me. Yes, you have certainly
convinced me of something.'

" His tone was so queer and mystical that

MANALIVE. 313

I felt impelled to ask him what he meant,
and of what exactly I had convinced him.

" ' You have convinced me,' he said with
the same dreamy eye, ' why it is really
wicked and dangerous for a man to run

away from his wife.' , _

— ~* And Avhy is it dangerous? ' I inquired.

" c Why, because nobody can find him,'
answered this odd person, ' and we all want
to be found.'

*rrThe most original modern thinkers,' I

remarked, ' Ibsen, Gorki, Nietzsche, Shaw,
would all say rather that what we want
most is to be lost : to find ourselves in
untrodden paths, and to do unprecedented
things ; to break with the past and belong I
to the future.'

" He rose to his whole height somewhat
sleepily, and looked round on what was, I
confess, a somewhat desolate scene — the dark
purple plains, the neglected railroad, the few
ragged knots of the malcontents. « I shall

3 14 MAN ALIVE.

not find the house here,' he said. c It is
still eastward — further and further eastward.'

" Then he turned upon me with some-
thing like fury, and struck the foot of his pole
upon the frozen earth.

" c And if I do go back to my country,'
he cried, c I may be locked up in a madhouse
before I reach my own house. I have been
a bit unconventional in my time ! Why,
Nietzsche stood in a row of ramrods in the
silly old Prussian army, and Shaw takes
temperance beverages in the suburbs ; but
the things I do are unprecedented things.
This round road I am treading is an un-
trodden path. I do believe in breakingjiiit-^
'1 am a revolutionist. But don't you see that \
all these real leaps and destructions and
escapes are only attempts to get back to
Eden — to something we have had, to some-
•thing at least we have heard of f Don't
you see one only breaks the fence or shoots
the moon in order to get home ? '

MANALIVE. 315

" c No,' I answered after due reflection,
4 1 don't think I should accept that.'

" c Ah,' he said with a sort of sigh, £ then
you have explained a second thing to me.'

" £ What do you mean ? ' I asked ;
' what thing ? '

" c Why your revolution has failed,' he
__sajdj_*n9 waiking^aCToss~quite suddenly to
the train he got into it just as it was
steaming away at last. And I saw the
long snaky tail of it disappear along the
darkening flats.

" I saw no more of him. But though his
views were adverse to the best advanced
thought, he struck me as an interesting
person : I should like to find out if he has
produced any literary works. — Yours, etc.,
" PAUL NICKOLAIOVITCH."

There was something in this odd set of
glimpses into foreign lives which kept the
absurd tribunal quieter than it had hitherto

316 MANALIVE.

been, and it was again without interruption
that Inglewood opened another paper upon
his pile. "The Court will be indulgent,"
he said, " if the next note lacks the special
ceremonies of our letter-writing. It is cere-
monious enough in its own way : —

" The Celestial Principles are permanent :
Greeting. — I am Wong-Hi, and I tend the
temple of all the ancestors of my family in
the forest of Fu. The man that broke
through the sky and came to me said that
it must be very dull, but I showed him the
wrongness of his thought. I am indeed in
one place, for my uncle took me to this
temple when I was a boy, and in this I shall
doubtless die. But if a man remain in one
place he shall see that the place changes.
The pagoda of my temple stands up silently
out of all the trees, like a yellow pagoda above
many green pagodas. But the skies are
sometimes blue like porcelain, and some-

MANALIVE. 317

times green like jade, and sometimes red like
garnet. But the night is always ebony and
always returns, said the Emperor Ho.

" The sky-breaker came at evening very
suddenly, for I had hardly seen any stirring
in the tops of the green trees over which I
look as over a sea, when I go to the top of
the temple at morning. And yet when he
came, it was as if an elephant had strayed
from the armies of the great kings of India.
For palms snapped, and bamboos broke, and
there came forth in the sunshine before the
temple one taller than the sons of men.

" Strips of red and white hung about him
like ribbons of a carnival, and he carried a
pole with a row of teeth on it like the teeth
of a dragon. His face was white and discom-
posed, after the fashion of the foreigners, so
that they look like dead men filled with
devils ; and he spoke our speech brokenly.

" He said to me, c This is only a temple ; I
am trying to find a house.' And then he

318 MANALIVE.

told me with indelicate haste that the lamp
outside his house was green, and that there
was a red post at the corner of it.

" c I have not seen your house or any
houses,' I answered. * I dwell in this
temple and serve the gods.'

" ' Do you believe in the gods ? ' he asked
with hunger in his eyes, like the hunger of
dogs. And this seemed to me a strange
question to ask, for what should a man do
except what men have done ?

" ' My Lord,' I said, 'it must be good for
men to hold up Jtheir hands even if the skies
are empty. fPor if there are gods, they will
be pleased, ancF if there are none, then there
are none to be displeased./ Sometimes the
skies are gold and sometimes porphyry and
sometimes ebony, but the trees and the
temple stand still under all. So the great
Confucius taught us that if we do always the
same things with our hands and our feet as
do the wise beasts and birds, with our

MANALIVE. 319

heads we may think many things : yes, my
Lord, and doubt many things. So long as
men offer rice at the right season, and kindle
lanterns at the right hour, it matters little
whether jhere be gods or no. For these
things are not to appease gods, Hut to
appease men.'

" He came yet closer to me, so that he
seemed enormous ; yet his look was very
gentle.

your gods will be freed.'

"~" Ariel"" i, smiling at his simplicity, an-
swered : ' And so,Jf there be no gods, I shall
have nothingj^t^-lbroken temple.'

"^nd at this, that giant from whom the
light of reason was withheld threw out his
mighty arms and asked me to forgive him.
And when I asked him for what he should
be forgiven he answered : ' Fnr_. bring.
right.'

" ' Your idols and emperors are so old and

320 MANALIVE.

wise and satisfying,' he cried, 'it is a shame
that they should be wrong. We are so
vulgar and violent, we_ have done you so"
many iniquities — it is a shame that we should
be right after aliT"

" And I, still enduring his harmlessness,
asked him why he thought that he and his
people were right.

^^And he answered : ' We arc right because
we are bound where men should be bound,
and free where men should be free. We are
right because we doubt and destroy laws and
we doiotdoubt

_

right to destroy them. For ^you live _J>y
customs7^Bu!^we--^y^creeds. Behold me !
In my country I am called Smip. My
country is abandoned, my name is defiled,
because I pursue across the world what I
really belongs to me. You are~~sfeadfast as |
fEe trees because you do not believe. I am as
fickle as the tempest because I do believe. I <
do believe in my own house, which I shall

MAN ALIVE. 321

find again. And at the last remaineth the
green lantern and the red post.'

"I said to him : £At the last remaineth
only wisdom.'

^~~"~mrt<e^en a? I said the word he uttered
a horrible shout, and rushing forward disap-
peared among the trees. I have not seen
this man again nor any other man. The
virtues of the wise are of fine brass.

"WONG-HI."

" The next letter I have to read," pro-
ceeded Arthur Inglewood, " will probably
make clear the nature of our client's curious
but innocent experiment. It is dated from
a mountain village in California, and runs
as follows : —

" SIR, — A person answering to the rather
extraordinary description required certainly
went, some time ago, over the high pass of
the Sierras on which I live and of which I

am probably the sole stationary inhabitant. I
11

322 MANALIVE.

keep a rudimentary tavern, rather ruder than
a hut, on the very top of this specially steep
and threatening pass. My name is Louis
Hara, and the very name may puzzle you
about my nationality. Well, it puzzles me
a great deal. When one has been for fifteen
years without society it is hard to have
patriotism ; and where there is not even a
hamlet it is difficult to invent a nation. My
father was an Irishman of the fiercest and
most free-shooting of the old Californian
kind. My mother was a Spaniard, proud of
descent from the old Spanish families round
San Francisco, yet accused for all that of
some admixture of Red Indian blood. I was
well educated and fond of music and books.
But, like many other hybrids, I was too
bad or too good for the world ; and after
attempting many things I was glad enough
to get a sufficient though a lonely living in
this little cabaret in the mountains. In my
solitude I fell into many of the ways of a

MANALIVE. 323

savage. Like an Eskimo, I was shapeless in
winter; like a Red Indian, I wore in hot
summers nothing but a pair of leather trousers,
with a great straw hat as big as a parasol to
defend me from the sun. I had a bowie
knife at my belt and a long gun under my
arm ; and I dare say I produced a pretty wild
impression on the few peaceable travellers
that could climb up to my place. But I
promise you I never looked as mad as that
man did. Compared to him I was Fifth
Avenue.

" I dare say that living under the very
tops of the Sierras has an odd effect on the
mind ; one tends to think of those lonely
rocks not as peaks coming to a point, but
rather as pillars holding up heaven itself.
Straight cliffs sail up and away beyond the
hope of the eagles ; cliffs so tall that they
seem to attract the stars and collect them as
sea-crags collect a mere glitter of phos-
phorous. These terraces and towers of rock

3 24 MAN ALIVE.

do not, like smaller crests, seem to be the
end of the world. Rather they seem to be
its awful beginning : its huge foundations.
We could almost fancy the mountain branch-
ing out above us like a tree of stone, and
carrying all those cosmic lights like a cande-
labrum. For just as the peaks failed us, soar-
ing impossibly far, so the stars crowded us
(as it seemed), coming impossibly near. The
spheres burst about us more like thunderbolts
hurled at the earth than planets circling
placidly about it.

" All this may have driven me mad : I
am not sure. I know there is one angle of
the road down the pass where the rock
leans out a little, and on windy nights I
seem to hear it clashing overhead with
other rocks — yes, city against city and
citadel against citadel, far up into the night.
It was on such an evening that the strange
man struggled up the pass. Broadly speak-
ing, only strange men did struggle up the

MANALIVE. 325

pass. But I had never seen one like this
one before.

" He carried (I cannot conceive why) a
long, dilapidated garden rake, all bearded and
bedraggled with grasses, so that it looked like
the ensign of some old barbarian tribe. His
hair, which was as long and rank as the grass,
hung down below his huge shoulders ; and
such clothes as clung about him were rags and
tongues of red and yellow, so that he had the
air of being dressed like an Indian in feathers
or autumn leaves. The rake or pitchfork, or
whatever it was, he used sometimes as an alpen-
stock, sometimes (I was told) as a weapon. I
do not know why he should have used it as a
weapon, for he had, and afterwards showed
me, an excellent six-shooter in his pocket.
1 But that] he said, * I use only for peaceful
purposes.' I have no notion what he meant.

" He sat down on the rough bench outside
my inn and drank some wine from the vine-
yards below, sighing with ecstasy over it

326 MANALIVE.

like one who had travelled long among alien,
cruel things and found at last something that
he knew. Then he sat staring rather foolishly
at the rude lantern of lead and coloured glass
that hangs over my door. It is old, but of no
value ; my grandmother gave it me long
ago : she was devout, and it happens that
the glass is painted with a crude picture of
Bethlehem and the Wise Men and the Star.
He seemed so mesmerized with the trans-
parent glow of Our Lady's blue gown and
the big gold star behind, that he led me also
to look at the thing, which I had not done
for fourteen years.

" Then he slowly withdrew his eyes from
this and looked out eastward where the road
fell away below us. The sunset sky was a
vault of rich violet, fading away into mauve
and silver round the edges of the dark
mountain amphitheatre ; and between us and
the ravine below rose up out of the deeps and
went up into the heights the straight solitary

MANALIVE. 327

rock we call Green Finger. Of a queer vol-
canic colour, and wrinkled all over with what
looks undecipherable writing, it hung there
like a Babylonian pillar or needle.

" The man silently stretched out his rake
in that direction, and before he spoke I knew
what he meant. Beyond the great green
rock in the purple sky hung a single star.

"'A star in the east,' he said in a strange
hoarse voice like one of our ancient eagles'.
c The wise men followed the star and found
the house. But if I followed the star, should
I find the house ? '

" ' It depends perhaps,' I said, smiling,
' on whether you are a wise man.' I re-
frained from adding that he certainly didn't
look it."

it C

You may judge for yourself,' he
answered. ' I am a man who left his own
house because he could no longer bear to
away from it.'

Et certainly sounds paradoxical,' I said.

328 MAN ALIVE.

" ' I heard my wife and children talking

^ >and saw them moving about the room,' he

N£ continued, * and all the time I knew they

'-'^were walking and talking in another house

thousands of miles away, under the light of

different skies, and beyond the series of the

seas. I loved them with a devouring love,

because they seemed not only distant but

unattainable. Never did human creatures

seem so dear and so desirable : but I seemed

like a cold ghost. I loved them intolerably ;

therefore I cast off their dust from my feet

for a testimony. Nay, I did more. I

spurned the world under my feet so that

it swung full circle like a treadmill.'

" ' Do you really mean,' I cried, c that
you have come right round the world ?
Your speech is English, yet you are coming
from the west.'

" * My pilgrimage is not yet accom-
plished,' he replied sadly. c I have become a
pilgrim to cure myself of being an exile.'

MAN ALIVE. 329

" Something in the word ' pilgrim ' awoke
down in the roots of my ruinous experience
memories of what my fathers had felt about the
world, and of something from whence I came.
I looked again at the little pictured lantern at
which I had not looked for fourteen years.

" l My grandmother,' I said in a low '
tone, c would have said that we were all in J
exile, and that no earthly house could cure the 'j
holy home-sickness that forbids us rest.'

" He was silent a long while, and watched
a single eagle drift out beyond the Green
Finger into the darkening void.

" Then he said : ' I think your grand-
mother was right,' and stood up leaning on
his grassy pole. 'I think that must be the
reason,' he said — * the secret of this life of
man, so ecstatic and so unappeased. But
I think there is more to be said. I think
God has given us the love of special places,
of a hearth and of a native land, for a good

reason.'

lla

330 MAN ALIVE.

" c 1 dare say,' I said. ' What reason ? '

" c Because otherwise,' he said, pointing his
pole out at the sky and the abyss, 'we might
worship that.'

" ' What do you mean ? ' I demanded.

" c Eternity,' he said in his harsh voice,
4 the largest of the idols — the mightiest of
the rivals of God.'

"'You mean pantheism and infinity and all
that,' I suggested.

" c I mean,' he said with increasing vehe-
mence, ' that if there be a house for me in
heaven it will either have a green lamp-post
and a hedge, or something quite as positive
and personal as a green lamp-post and a
hedge. I mean that God bade me love
one spot and serve it, and do all things
however wild in praise of it, so that this
one spot might be a witness against all the
infinities and the sophistries, that Paradise is
somewhere and not anywhere, is something
and not anything. And I would not be so

1 ~~ " In

MANALIVE. 331

very much surprised if the house in heaven
had a real green lamp-post after all.'

" With which he shouldered his pole and
went striding down the perilous paths below,
and left me alone with the eagles. But since
he went a fever of homelessness will often
shake me. I am troubled by rainy meadows
and mud cabins I have never seen ; and li
wonder whether America will endure. — Yours!
faithfully, Louis HARA."

After a short silence Inglewood said :
"And, finally, we desire to put in as
evidence the following document : —

"This is to say that I am Ruth Davis,
and have been housemaid to Mrs. I. Smith
at ' The Laurels ' in Croydon for the last six
months. When I came the lady was alone,
with two children ; she was not a widow,
but her husband was away. She was left
with plenty of money and did not seem

332 MANALIVE.

disturbed about him, though she often
hoped he would be back soon. She said
he was rather eccentric and a little change
did him good. One evening last week I
was bringing the tea-things out on to the
lawn when I nearly dropped them. The end
of a long rake was suddenly stuck over the
hedge, and planted like a jumping-pole ; and
over the hedge, just like a monkey on a stick,
came a huge, horrible man, all hairy and ragged
like Robinson Crusoe. I screamed out, but
my mistress didn't even get out of her chair,
but smiled and said he wanted shaving. Then
he sat down quite calmly at the garden table
and took a cup of tea, and then I realized that
this must be Mr. Smith himself. He has
stopped here ever since and does not really
give much trouble, though I sometimes fancy
he is a little weak in his head.

" RUTH DAVIS.

" P.S. — I forgot to say that he looked
round at the garden and said, very loud and

MAN ALIVE. 333

strong: 'Oh, what a lovely place you've
got ;' just as if he'd never seen it before."

The room had been growing dark and
drowsy ; the afternoon sun sent one heavy
shaft of powdered gold across it, which fell
with an intangible solemnity upon the empty
seat of Mary Gray, for the younger women
had left the court before the more recent
of the investigations. Mrs. Duke was still
asleep, and Innocent Smith, looking like a
huge hunchback in the twilight, was bending
closer and closer to his paper toys. But the
five men really engaged in the controversy,
and concerned not to convince the tribunal
but to convince each other, still sat round
the table like the Committee of Public Safety.

Suddenly Moses Gould banged one big
scientific book on top of another, cocked
his little legs up against the table, tipped
his chair backwards so far as to be in direct
danger of falling over, emitted a startling and

334 MANALIVE.

prolonged whistle like a steam engine, and
Asserted that it was all his eye.

When asked by Moon wjiat was all his
eye, he banged down behind the books again
and answered with considerable excitement,
throwing his papers about. " All those fairy-
tales you've been reading out," he said.
" Oh ! don't talk to me ! I ain't littery and
that, but I know fairy-tales when I hear
'em. I got a bit stumped in some of the
philosophical bits and felt inclined to go
out for a B. and S. But we're living in
West 'Ampstead and not in 'Ell ; and the
long and the short of it is that some things
'appen and some things don't 'appen. Those
are the things that don't 'appen."

" I thought," said Moon gravely, " that
we quite clearly explained —

" Oh yes, old chap, you quite clearly
explained," assented Mr. Gould with extra-
ordinary volubility. " You'd explain an
elephant off the doorstep, you would. I

MANALIVE. 335

ain't a clever chap like you ; but I ain't
a born natural, Michael Moon, and when
there's an elephant on my doorstep I don't
listen to no explanations. ' It's got a trunk,'
I says. — ' My trunk,' you says : ' I'm fond
of travelling and a change does me good.' —
' But the blasted thing's got tusks/ I says. —
4 Don't look a gift 'orse in the mouth,' you
says, e but thank the goodness and the graice
that on your birth 'as smiled/ — e But it's
nearly as big as the 'ouse,' I says. — c That's
the bloomin' perspective,' you says, c and the
saicred magic of distance.' — * Why, the
elephant's trumpetin' like the Day of Judg-
ment,' I says. — ' That's your own conscience
a-talking to you, Moses Gould/ you says
in a grive and tender voice. Well, I 'ave
got a conscience as much as you. I don't
believe most of the things they tell you in
church on Sundays ; and I don't believe
these 'ere things any more because you goes
on about 'em as if you was in church. I

336 MANALIVE.

believe an elephant's a great big ugly dinger-
ous beast — and I believe Smith's another."

" Do you mean to say," asked Inglewood,
" that you still doubt the evidence of
exculpation we have brought forward ? "

"Yes, I do still dbubt it," said Gould
warmly. " It's all a bit too far-fetched,
and some of it a bit too far off. 'Ow can
we test all those tales ? 'Ow can we drop
in and buy the ' Pink 'Un ' at the railway
station at Kosky Wosky or whatever it was ?
'Ow can we go and do a gargle at that
saloon-bar on top of the Sierra Mountains ?
But anybody can go and see Bunting's
boarding-house at Worthing."

Moon regarded him with an expression
of real or assumed surprise.

" Any one," continued Gould, " can call
on Mr. Trip."

" It is a comforting thought," replied
Michael with restraint ; " but why should
any one call on Mr. Trip ? "

MANALIVE. 337

" For just exactly the sime reason," cried
the excited Moses, hammering on the table
with both hands, "for just exactly the sime
reason that he should communicate with
Messrs. 'Anbury and Bootle of Paternoster
Row and with Miss Gridley's 'igh class
Academy at 'Endon, and with old Lady
Bullingdon who lives at Penge."

" Again, to go at once to the moral roots
of life," said Michael, " why is it among
the duties of man to communicate with old
Lady Bullingdon who lives at Penge ? "

" It ain't one of the duties of man," said
Gould, " nor one of his pleasures either, I
can tell you. She takes the crumpet, does
Lady Bullingdon at Penge. But it's one
of the duties of a prosecutor pursuin' the
innocent, blameless butterfly career of your
friend Smith, and it's the sime with all the
others I mentioned."

" But why do you bring in these people
here ? " asked Inglewood.

338 MANALIVE.

" Why! Because we've got proof enough
to sink a steamboat," roared Moses ; " be-
cause I've got the papers in my very 'and ;
because your precious Innocent is a black-
guard and 'ome smasher, and these are the
'omes he's smashed. I don't set up for an
'oly man ; but I wouldn't 'ave all those
poor girls on my conscience for something.
And I think a chap that's capable of desert-
ing and perhaps killing 'em all is about
capable of cracking a crib or shootin' an
old schoolmaster — so I don't care much
about "the other yarns one way or another."

" I think," said Dr. Cyrus Pym with a
refined cough, " that we are approaching
this matter rather irregularly. This is really
the fourth charge on the charge sheet, and
perhaps I had better put it before you in
an ordered and scientific manner."

Nothing but a faint groan from Michael
broke the silence of the darkening room.

Chapter IV.

THE WILD WEDDINGS;
OR, THE POLYGAMY CHARGE.

"^ MODERN man," said Dr. Cyrus Pym,
"must, if he be thoughtful, approach
the problem of marriage with some caution.
Marriage is a stage — doubtless a suitable
stage — in the long advance of mankind
towards a goal which we cannot as yet
conceive ; which we are not, perhaps, yet
fitted even to desire. What, gentlemen, is
now the ethical position of marriage ? Have
we outlived it ? "

"Outlived it?" broke out Moon ; "why,
nobody's ever survived it ! Look at all the
people married since Adam and Eve — and all
as dead as mutton."

340 MANALIVE.

"This is no doubt an inter-pellation joc'lar
in its character," said Dr. Pym frigidly. " I
cannot tell what may be Mr. Moon's matured
and ethical view of marriage — "

" I can tell," said Michael savagely, out
of the gloom. " Marriage is a duel to the
death, which no man of honour should
decline."

" Michael," said Arthur Inglewood in a
low voice, " you must keep quiet."

" Mr. Moon," said Pym with exquisite
good temper, " probably regards the institu-
tion in a more antiquated manner. Probably
he would make it stringent and uniform.
He would treat divorce in some great soul
of steel — the divorce of a Julius Caesar or
of a Salt Ring Robinson — exactly as he
would treat some no -account tramp or
labourer who scoots from his wife. Science
has views broader and more humane. Just
as murder for the scientist is a thirst for
absolute destruction, just as theft for the

MANALIVE. 341

scientist is a hunger for monotonous acquisi-
tion, so polygamy for the scientist is an
extreme development of the instinct for
variety. A man thus afflicted is incapable
of constancy. Doubtless there is a physical
cause for this flitting from flower to flower
— as there is, doubtless, for the intermittent
groaning which appears to afflict Mr. Moon
at the present moment. Our own world-
scorning Winterbottom has even dared to
say, ' For a certain rare and fine physical
type free polygamy is but the realization
of the variety of females, as comradeship is
the realization of the variety of males.' In
any case, the type that tends to variety is
recognized by all authoritative inquirers.
Such a type, if the widower of a negress,
does in many ascertained cases espouse en
seconde noces an albino ; such a type, when
freed from the gigantic embraces of a female
Patagonian, will often evolve from its own
imaginative instinct the consoling figure of

342 MANALIVE.

an Eskimo. To such a type there can be
no doubt that the prisoner belongs. If
blind doom and unbearable temptation con-
stitute any slight excuse for a man, there is
no doubt that he has these excuses.

" Earlier in the inquiry the defence showed
real chivalric ideality in admitting half of our
story without further dispute. We should
like to acknowledge and imitate so eminently
large-hearted a style by conceding also that
the story told by Curate Percy about the
canoe, the weir, and the young wife seems
to be substantially true. Apparently Smith
did marry a young woman he had nearly
run down in a boat ; it only remains to be
considered whether it would not have been
kinder of him to have murdered her instead
of marrying her. In confirmation of this
fact I can now con-cede to the defence an
unquestionable record of such a marriage."

So saying, he handed across to Michael a
cutting from the Maidenhead Gazette which

MANALIVE. 343

distinctly recorded the marriage of the
daughter of a " coach," a tutor well known
in the place, to Mr. Innocent Smith, late
of Brakespeare College, Cambridge.

When Dr. Pym resumed it was realized
that his face had grown at once both tragic
and triumphant.

" I pause upon this pre-liminary fact," he
said seriously, " because this fact alone would
give us the victory, were we aspiring after
victory and not after truth. As far as the
personal and domestic problem holds us, that
problem is solved. Dr. Warner and I entered
this house at an instant of highly emotional
difFculty. England's Warner has entered
many houses to save human kind from sick-
ness ; this time he entered to save an inno-
cent lady from a walking pestilence. Smith
was just about to carry away a young girl
from this house ; his cab and bag were at
the very door. He had told her she was
going to await the marriage licence at the

344 MANALIVE.

house of his aunt. That aunt," continued
Cyrus Pym, his face darkening grandly —
" that visionary aunt had been the dancing
will-o'-the-wisp who had led many a high-
souled maiden to her doom. Into how
many virginal ears has he whispered that
holy word ? When he said ' aunt ' there
glowed about her all the merriment and
high morality of the Anglo-Saxon home.
Kettles began to hum, pussy cats to purr,
in that very wild cab that was being driven
to destruction."

Inglewood looked up, to find, to his
astonishment (as many another denizen of
the eastern hemisphere has found), that the
American was not only perfectly serious, but
was really eloquent and affecting — when the
difference of the hemispheres was adjusted.

" It is therefore atrociously evident that
the man Smith has at least represented him-
self to one innocent female of this house as
an eligible bachelor, being, in fact, a married

MANALIVE. 345

man. I agree with my colleague, Mr.
Gould, that no other crime could approxi-
mate to this. As to whether what our
ancestors called purity has any ultimate
ethical value indeed, science hesitates with
a high, proud hesitation. But what hesita-
tion can there be about the baseness of a
citizen who ventures, by brutal experiments
upon living females, to anticipate the verdict
of science on such a point ?

" The woman mentioned by Curate Percy
as living with Smith in Highbury may or
may not be the same as the lady he married
in Maidenhead. If one short sweet spell of
constancy and heart repose interrupted the
plunging torrent of his profligate life, we will
not deprive him of that long past possibility.
After that conjectural date, alas, he seems to
have plunged deeper and deeper into the
shaking quagmires of infidelity and shame."

Dr. Pym closed his eyes, but the unfor-
tunate fact that there was no more light left

346 MANALIVE.

this familiar signal without its full and proper
moral effect. After a pause, which almost
partook of the character of prayer, he con-
tinued.

" The first instance of the accused's repeated
and irregular nuptials," he exclaimed, " comes
from Lady Bullingdon, who expresses her-
self with the high haughtiness which must
be excused in those who look out upon all
mankind from the turrets of a Norman and
ancestral keep. The communication she has
sent to us runs as follows : —

" Lady Bullingdon recalls the painful inci-
dent to which reference is made, and has
no desire to deal with it in detail. The girl
Polly Green was a perfectly adequate dress-
maker, and lived in the village for about two
years. Her unattached condition was bad
for her as well as for the general morality
of the village. Lady Bullingdon, therefore,
allowed it to be understood that she favoured

MANALIVE. 347

the marriage of the young woman. The
villagers, naturally wishing to oblige Lady
Bullingdon, came forward in several cases ;
and all would have been well had it not been
for the deplorable eccentricity or depravity
of the girl Green herself. Lady Bullingdon
supposes that where there is a village there
must be a village idiot, and in her village,
it seems, there was one of these wretched
creatures. Lady Bullingdon only saw him
once, and she is quite aware that it is really
difficult to distinguish between actual idiots
and the ordinary heavy type of the rural
lower classes. She noticed, however, the
startling smallness of his head in comparison
to the rest of his body ; and, indeed, the fact
of his having appeared upon election day
wearing the rosette of both the two opposing
parties appears to Lady Bullingdon to put
the matter beyond a doubt. Lady Bullingdon
was astounded to learn that this afflicted
being had put himself forward as one of

348 MANALIVE.

the suitors of the girl in question. Lady
Bullingdon's nephew interviewed the wretch
upon the point, telling him that he was a
' donkey ' to dream of such a thing, and
actually received, along with an imbecile
grin, the answer that donkeys generally go
after carrots. But Lady Bullingdon was yet
further amazed to find the unhappy girl
inclined to accept this monstrous proposal,
though she was actually asked in marriage
by Garth, the undertaker, a man in a far
superior position to her own. Lady Bulling-
don could not, of course, countenance such
an arrangement for a moment, and the two
unhappy persons escaped for a clandestine
marriage. Lady Bullingdon cannot exactly
recall the man's name, but thinks it was Smith.
He was always called in the village the In-
nocent. Later, Lady Bullingdon believes he
murdered Green in a mental outbreak."

" The next communication," proceeded

MANALIVE. 349

Pym, " is more conspicuous for brevity, but
I am of opinion that it will adequately convey
its upshot. It is dated from the offices of
Messrs. Hanbury and Bootle, publishers, and
is as follows : —

" SIR, — Yrs. red. and conts. noted. Ru-
mour re typewriter possibly refers to a Miss
Blake or similar name, left here nine years
ago to marry an organ-grinder. Case was
undoubtedly curious, and attracted police
attention. Girl worked excellently till about
Oct. 1907, when apparently went mad.
Record was written at the time, part of
which I enclose. — Yrs., etc., W. TRIP."

" The fuller statement runs as follows : —

" On October 1 2 a letter was sent from
this office to Messrs. Bernard and Juke,
bookbinders. Opened by Mr. Juke, it was
found to contain the following : ' Sir, our

350 MANALIVE.

Mr. Trip will call at 3, as we wish to know
whether it is really decided 00000073^
! ! ! ! ! Ary.' To this Mr. Juke, a person of
a playful mind, returned the answer : ' Sir,
after consulting all the members of the firm,
I am in a position to give it as my most
decided opinion that it is not really decided
that 00000073^ ! ! ! ! ! xy. — Yrs. etc.,

<J. JUKE.'

" On receiving this extraordinary reply,
our Mr. Trip asked for the original letter
sent from him, and found that the type-
writer had indeed substituted these demented
hieroglyphics for the sentences really dictated
to her. Our Mr. Trip interviewed the girl,
fearing that she was in an unbalanced state,
and was not much reassured when she merely
remarked that she always went like that
when she heard the barrel organ. Becoming
yet more hysterical and extravagant, she
made a series of most improbable statements —

MANALIVE. 351

as, that she was engaged to the barrel-organ
man, that he was in the habit of serenading
her on that instrument, that she was in the
habit of playing back to him upon the type-
writer (in the style of King Richard and
Blondel), and that the organ man's musical
ear was so exquisite and his adoration of her-
self so ardent that he could detect the note
of the different letters on the machine, and
was enraptured by them as by a melody.
To all these statements of course our Mr.
Trip and the rest of us only paid that sort of
assent that is paid to persons who must as
quickly as possible be put in the charge of
their relations. But on our conducting the
lady downstairs, her story received the most
startling and even exasperating confirmation ;
for the organ-grinder, an enormous man with
a small head and manifestly a fellow-lunatic,
had pushed his barrel organ in at the office
doors like a battering-ram, and was bois-
terously demanding his alleged fiancee. When

352 MAN ALIVE.

I myself came on the scene he was flinging
his great, ape-like arms about and reciting a
poem to her. But we were used to lunatics
coming and reciting poems in our office, and
we were not quite prepared for what followed.
The actual verse he uttered began, I think,

1 0 vivid, inviolate head,
Ringed — '

but he never got any further. Mr. Trip
made a sharp movement towards him, and
the next moment the giant picked up the
poor lady typewriter like a doll, sat her on
top of the organ, ran it with a crash out of
the office doors, and raced away down the
street like a flying wheelbarrow. I put
the police upon the matter ; but no trace
of the amazing pair could ever be found. I
was sorry myself; for the lady was not
only pleasant but unusually cultivated for
her position. As I am leaving the serv-
ice of Messrs. Hanbury and Bootle, I put

MANALIVE. 353

these things in a record and leave it with
them. (Signed) AUBREY CLARKE,

Publishers' Reader.

" And the last document," said Dr. Pym
complacently, " is from one of those high-
souled women who have in this age intro-
duced your English girlhood to hockey, the
higher mathematics, and every form of ideality.

"DEAR SIR (she writes), — I have no
objection to telling you the facts about
the absurd incident you mention ; though I
would ask you to communicate them with
some caution, for such things, however
entertaining in the abstract, are not always
auxiliary to the success of a girls' school.
The truth is this : I wanted some one to
deliver a lecture on a philological or his-
torical question — a lecture which, while
containing solid educational matter, should
be a little more popular and entertaining
than usual, as it was the last lecture of the

12

354 MANALIVE.

term. I remembered that a Mr. Smith of
Cambridge had written somewhere or other
an amusing essay about his own somewhat
ubiquitous name — an essay which showed
considerable real knowledge of genealogy
and topography. I wrote to him, asking if
he would come and give us a bright address
upon English surnames ; and he did. It was
very bright, almost too bright. To put the
matter otherwise, by the time that he was
halfway through it became apparent to the
other mistresses and myself that the man was
totally and entirely off his head. He began
rationally enough by dealing with the two
departments of place names and trade names,
and he said (quite rightly, I dare say) that
the loss of all significance in names was an
instance of the deadening of civilization.
But he then went on calmly to maintain
that every man who had a place name ought
to go to live in that place, and that every
man who had a trade name ought instantly

MAN ALIVE. 355

to adopt that trade ; that people named after
colours should always dress in those colours,
and that people named after trees or plants
(such as Beech or Rose) ought to surround
and decorate themselves with these vege-
tables. In a slight discussion that arose
afterwards among the elder girls the diffi-
culties of the proposal were clearly, and even
eagerly, pointed out. It was urged, for
instance, by Miss Younghusband that it was
substantially impossible for her to play the
part assigned to her ; Miss Mann was in a
similar dilemma, from which no modern
views on the sexes could apparently extricate
her ; and some young ladies, whose sur-
names happened to be Low, Coward, and
Craven, were quite enthusiastic against the
idea. But all this happened afterwards.
What happened at the crucial moment was
that the lecturer produced several horseshoes
and a large iron hammer from his bag, an-
nounced his immediate intention of setting up

356 MAN ALIVE.

a smithy in the neighbourhood, and called on
every one to rise in the same cause as for a
heroic revolution. The other mistresses and
I attempted to stop the wretched man, but
I must confess that by an accident this very
intercession produced the worst explosion of
his insanity. He was waving the hammer,
and wildly demanding the names of every-
body ; and it so happened that Miss Brown,
one of the younger teachers, was wearing a
brown dress — a reddish-brown dress that
went quietly enough with the warmer
colour of her hair, as well she knew. She
was a nice girl, and nice girls do know
about those things. But when our maniac
discovered that we really had a Miss Brown
who was brown, his idfa Jixe blew up like a
powder magazine, and there, in the presence
of all the mistresses and girls, he publicly
proposed to the lady in the red -brown
dress. You can imagine the effect of such
a scene at a girls' school. At least, if

MANALIVE. 357

you fail to imagine it, I certainly fail to
describe it.

" Of course the anarchy died down in a
week or two, and I can think of it now as a
joke. There was only one curious detail,
which I will tell you, as you say your
inquiry is vital ; but I should desire you to
consider it a little more confidential than the
rest. Miss Brown, who was an excellent
girl in every way, did quite suddenly and
surreptitiously leave us only a day or two
afterwards. I should never have thought
that her head would be the one to be really
turned by so absurd an excitement. — Believe
me, yours faithfully, ADA GRIDLEY.

" I think," said Pym, with a really con-
vincing simplicity and seriousness, " that
these letters speak for themselves."

Mr. Moon rose for the last time in a dark-
ness that gave no hint of whether his native
gravity was mixed with his native irony.

358 MANALIVE.

" Throughout this inquiry," he said,
" but especially in this its closing phase, the
prosecution has perpetually relied on one
argument ; I mean the fact that no one
knows what has become of all the unhappy
women apparently seduced by Smith.
There is no sort of proof that they were
murdered, but that implication is per-
petually made wrien the question is asked
as to how they died. Now I am not in-
terested in how they died, or when they
died, or whether they died. But I am
interested in another analogous question —
that of how they were born, and when they
were born, and whether they were born.
Do not misunderstand me. I do not dis-
pute the existence of these women, or the
veracity of those who have witnessed to
them. I merely remark on the notable fact
that only one of these victims, the Maiden-
head girl, is described as having any home
or parents. All the rest are boarders or

MANALIVE. 359

birds of passage — a guest, a solitary dress-
maker, a bachelor-girl doing typewriting.
Lady Ballingdon, looking from her turrets,
which she bought from the Whartons with
the old soap-boiler's money when she
jumped at marrying an unsuccessful gentle-
man from Ulster — Lady Ballingdon, looking
out from those turrets, did really see an
object which she describes as Green. Mr.
Trip, of Hanbury and Bootle, really did have
a typewriter betrothed to Smith. Miss
Gridley, though idealistic, is absolutely
honest. She did house, feed, and teach a
young woman whom Smith succeeded in
decoying away. We admit that all these
women really lived. But we still ask whether
they were ever born ? "

" Oh, crikey ! " said Moses Gould, stifled
with amusement.

" There could hardly," interposed Pym
with a quiet smile, " be a better instance
of the neglect of true scientific processes.

360 MANAL1VE.

The scientist, when once convinced of the
fact of vitality and consciousness, would infer
from these the previous processes of gen-
eration."

" If these gals," said Gould impatiently —
"if these gals were all alive (all alive O !),
I'd chance a fiver they were all born."

"You'd lose your fiver," said Michael,
speaking gravely out of the gloom. " All
those admirable ladies were alive. They
were more alive for having come into contact
with Smith. They were all quite definitely
alive, but only one of them was ever born."

" Are you asking us to believe — " began
Dr. Pym.

" I am asking you a second question," said
Moon sternly. " Can the court now sitting
throw any light on a truly singular circum-
stance ? Dr. Pym, in his interesting lecture
on what are called, I believe, the relations
of the sexes, said that Smith was the slave
of a lust for variety which would lead a man

MANALIVE. 361

first to a negress and then to an albino, first
to a Patagonian giantess and then to a tiny
Eskimo. But is there any evidence of such
variety here ? Is there any trace of a gigantic
Patagonian in the story ? Was the type-
writer an Eskimo ? So picturesque a cir-
cumstance would not surely have escaped
remark. Was Lady Bullingdon's dressmaker
a negress ? A voice in my bosom answers,
' No ! ' Lady Bullingdon, I am sure, would
think a negress so conspicuous as to be almost
Socialistic, and would feel something a little
rakish even about an albino.

" But was there in Smith's taste any such
variety as the learned doctor describes ? So
far as our slight materials go, the very op-
posite seems to be the case. We have only
one actual description of any of the prisoner's
wives — the short but highly poetic account
by the aesthetic curate. ' Her dress was the
colour of spring, and her hair of autumn
leaves.' Autumn leaves, of course, are of

12a

362 MANALIVE.

various colours, some of which would be
rather startling in hair (green, for instance) ;
but I think such an expression would be
most naturally used of the shades from red-
brown to red, especially as ladies with their
coppery-coloured hair do frequently wear
light artistic greens. Now when we come
to the next wife, we find the eccentric lover,
when told he is a donkey, answering that
donkeys always go after carrots ; a remark
which Lady Bullingdon evidently regarded
as pointless and part of the natural table-talk
of a village idiot, but which has an obvious
meaning if we suppose that Polly's hair was
red. Passing to the next wife, the one he
took from the girls' school, we find Miss
Gridley noticing that the schoolgirl in ques-
tion wore £ a reddish-brown dress, that went
quietly enough with the warmer colour
of her hair.' In other words, the colour
of the girl's hair was something redder than
red -brown. Lastly, the romantic organ-

MANALIVE. 363

grinder declaimed in the office some poetry
that only got as far as the words, —

1 0 vivid, inviolate head,
Ringed — '

But I think a wide study of the worst
modern poets will enable us to guess that
' ringed with a glory of red,' or ' ringed
with its passionate red,' was the line that
rhymed to ' head.' In this case once more,
therefore, there is good reason to suppose
that Smith fell in love with a girl with
some sort of auburn or darkish-red hair —
rather," he said, looking down at the table,
" rather like Miss Gray's hair."

Cyrus Pym was leaning forward with
lowered eyelids, ready with one of his more
pedantic interpellations ; but Moses Gould
suddenly struck his forefinger on his nose,
with an expression of extreme astonishment
and intelligence in his brilliant eyes.

" Mr. Moon's contention at present," in-

364 MANALIVE.

terposed Pym, " is not, even if veracious,
inconsistent with the lunatico-criminal view
of I. Smith, which we have nailed to the
mast. Science has long anticipated such a
complication. An incurable attraction to a
particular type of physical woman is one
of the commonest of criminal per-versities,
and when not considered narrowly, but in
the light of induction and evolution — "

" At this late stage," said Michael Moon
very quietly, "I may perhaps relieve myself
of a simple emotion that has been pressing
me throughout the proceedings, by saying
that induction and evolution may go and
boil themselves. The Missing Link and all
that is well enough for kids, but I'm talk-
ing about things we know. All we know
of the Missing Link is that he is missing —
and he won't be missed either. I know all
about his human head and his horrid tail ;
they belong to a very old game called ' Heads
I win, tails you lose.' If you do find a

MANALIVE. 365

fellow's bones, it proves he lived a long while
ago ; if you don't find his bones, it proves
how long ago he lived. That is the game
you've been playing with this Smith affair.
Because Smith's head is small for his shoulders
you call him microcephalous ; if it had
been large, you'd have called it water-on-
the-brain. As long as poor old Smith's
seraglio seemed pretty various, variety was
the sign of madness : now, because it's
turning out to be a bit monochrome — now
monotony is the sign of madness. I suffer
from all the disadvantages of being a grown-
up person, and I'm jolly well going to get
some of the advantages too ; and with all
politeness I propose not to be bullied with
long words instead of short reasons, or con-
sider your business a triumphant progress
merely because you're always finding out
that you were wrong. Having relieved my-
self of these feelings, I have merely to add
that I regard Dr. Pym as an ornament to the

3 66 MANALIVE.

world far more beautiful than the Parthenon,
or the monument on Bunker's Hill, and that
I propose to resume and conclude my remarks
on the many marriages of Mr. Innocent
Smith.

" Besides this red hair, there is another
unifying thread that runs through these
scattered incidents. There is something very
peculiar and suggestive about the names of
these women. Mr. Trip, you will remember,
said he thought the typewriter's name was
Blake, but could not remember exactly. I
suggest that it might very well have been
Black, and in that case we have a curious
series : Miss Green in Lady Bullingdon's
village ; Miss Brown at the Hendon School ;
Miss Black at the publishers. A chord of
colour, as it were, which ends up with Miss
Gray at Beacon House, West Hampstead."

Amid a dead silence Moon continued his
exposition. " What is the meaning of this
queer coincidence about colours ? Personally

MAN ALIVE. 367

I cannot doubt for a moment that these
names are purely arbitrary names, assumed
as part of some general scheme or joke. I
think it very probable that they were taken
from a series of costumes — that Polly Green
only meant Polly (or Mary) when in green,
and that Mary Gray only means Mary (or
Polly) when in gray. This would ex-
plain—"

Cyrus Pym was standing up rigid and
almost pallid. " Do you actually mean to
suggest — " he cried.

" Yes," said Michael ; " I do mean to
suggest that. Innocent Smith has had
many wooings, and many weddings for all
I know ; but he has had only one wife.
She was sitting on that chair an hour
ago, and is now talking to Miss Duke in
the garden.

" Yes, Innocent Smith has behaved here,
as he has on hundreds of other occasions,
upon a plain and perfectly blameless principle.

368 MANALIVE.

It is odd and extravagant in the modern
world, but not more than any other principle
plainly applied in the modern world would
be. His principle can be quite simply
stated : he refuses to die while he is still
alive. He seeks to remind himself, by every
electric shock to the intellect, that he is still
a man alive, walking on two legs about the
world. For this reason he fires bullets at
his best friends; for this reason he arranges x
ladders and collapsible chimneys to steal his 7
own property ; for this reason he goes plod-
ding round a whole planet to get back
to his own home ; and for this reason
he has been in the habit of taking the
woman whom he loved with a permanent
loyalty, and leaving her about (so to speak)
at schools, boarding-houses, and places of
business, so that he might recover her again
and again with a raid and a romantic elope-
ment. He seriously sought by a perpetual
recapture of his bride to keep alive the

MANALIVE. 369

sense of her perpetual value, and the perils
that should be run for her sake.

" So far his motives are clear enough ;
but perhaps his convictions are not quite so
clear. I think Innocent Smith has an idea
at the bottom of all this. I am by no means
sure that I believe it myself, but I am quite
sure that it is worth a man's uttering and
defending.

" The idea that Smith is attacking is this.
Living in an entangled civilization, we have
come to think certain things wrong which
are not wrong at all. We have come to
think outbreak and exuberance, banging
and barging, rotting and wrecking, wrong.
In themselves they are not merely pardonable ;
they are unimpeachable. There is nothing
wicked about firing off a pistol even at a
friend, so long as you do not mean to hit
him and know you won't. It is no more
wrong than throwing a pebble at the sea —
less, for you do occasionally hit the sea.

370 MANALIVE.

There is nothing wrong in bashing down a
chimney-pot and breaking through 'a roof,
so long as you are not injuring the life or
property of other men. It is no more wrong
to choose to enter a house from the top than
to choose to open a packing-case from the
bottom. There is nothing wicked about
walking round the world and coming back to
your own house ; it is no more wicked than
walking round the garden and coming back
to your own house. And there is nothing
wicked about picking up your wife here,
there, and everywhere, if, forsaking all others,
you keep only to her so long as you
both shall live. It is as innocent as play-
ing a game of hide-and-seek in the garden.
You associate such acts with blackguard-
ism by a mere snobbish association, as
you think there is something vaguely vile
about going (or being seen going) into a
pawnbroker's or a public-house. You think
there is something squalid and common-

MANALIVE. 371

place about such a connection. You are
..mistaken.

" This man's spiritual power has been
precisely this, that he has distinguished
between custom and creed. He has broken
the conventions, but he has kept the com-
mandments. It is as if a man were found
gambling wildly in a gambling hell, and you
found that he only played for trouser buttons.
It is as if you found a man making a
clandestine appointment with a lady at a
Covent Garden ball, and then you found
it was his grandmother. Everything is ugly
, and discreditable, except the facts; every-
* thing is wrong about him, except that he
;has done no wrong.

" It will then be asked, ' Why does Innocent
Smith continue far into his middle age a
farcical existence, that exposes him to so
many false charges ? ' To this I merely answer
that he does it because he really is happy,
because he really is hilarious, because he

372 MANALIVE.

really is a man and alive. He is so young
that climbing garden trees and playing silly
practical jokes are still to him what they
once were to us all. And if you ask me yet
again why he alone among men should be
fed with such inexhaustible follies, I have a
very simple answer to that, though it is one
that will not be approved.

" There is but one answer, and I am sorry
if you don't like it. If Innocent is happy, it
is because he is innocent. If he can defy the
conventions, it is just because he can keep
the commandments. It is just because he
does not want to kill but to excite to life
that a ""pistol is still as exciting to him as it is
to"¥ schoolboy. It is just because he does
not want to steal, because he does not covet
his neighbour's goods, that he has captured
the trick (oh, how we all long for it !), the
trick of coveting his own goods. It is just
because he does not want to commit adultery
that he achieves the romance of sex ; it is

MANALIVE. 373

just because he loves one wife that he has
a hundred honeymoons. If he had really
murdered a man, if he had really deserted
a woman, he would not be able to feel that
a pistol or a love-letter was like a song — at
least, not a comic song."

" Do not imagine, please, that any such
attitude is easy to me or appeals in any
particular way to my sympathies. I am an
Irishman, and a certain sorrow is in my
bones, bred either of the persecutions of my
creed, or of my creed itself. Speaking singly,
I feel as if man was tied to tragedy, and there
was no way out of the trap of old age and
doubt. But if there is a way out, then,
by Christ and St. Patrick, this is the w£y
out. If one could keep as happy as a child
or a dog, it would be by being as innocent as
a child, or as sinless as a dog. Barely and
brutally to be good — that may be the road,
and he may have found it. Well, well,
well, I see a look of scepticism on the face of

374 MANALIVE.

my old friend Moses. Mr. Gould does not
believe that being perfectly good in all
respects would make a man merry."

" No," said Gould, with an unusual and
convincing gravity ; " I do not believe that
being perfectly good in all respects would
make a man merry."

" Well," said Michael quietly, " will you
tell me one thing ? Which of us has ever
tried it ? "

A silence ensued, rather like the silence of
some long geological epoch which awaits the
emergence of some unexpected type ; for there
rose at last in the stillness a massive figure
that the other men had almost completely
forgotten.

" Well, gentlemen," said Dr. Warner cheer-
fully, " I've been pretty well entertained with
all this pointless and incompetent tomfoolery
for a couple of days ; but it seems to be
wearing rather thin, and I'm engaged for a
city dinner. Among the hundred flowers of

MANALIVE. 375

futility on both sides I was unable to detect
any sort of reason why a lunatic should be
allowed to shoot me in the back garden."

He had settled his silk hat on his head
and gone out sailing placidly to the garden
gate, while the almost wailing voice of Pym
still followed him : " But really the bullet
missed you by several feet." Arid another
voice added: "The bullet missed him by
several years."

There was a long and mainly unmeaning
silence, and then Moon said suddenly, " We
have been sitting with a ghost. Dr. Herbert
Warner died years ago."

Chapter V.

HOW THE GREAT WIND WENT
FROM BEACON HOUSE.

jyjARY was walking between Diana and
Rosamund slowly up and down the
garden ; they were silent, and the sun had
set. Such spaces of daylight as remained
open in the west were of a warm-tinted
white, which can be compared to nothing
but a cream cheese ; and the lines of plumy
cloud that ran across them had a soft but
vivid violet bloom, like a violet smoke. All
the rest of the scene swept and faded away
into a dove-like gray, and seemed to melt
and mount into Mary's dark - gray figure
until she seemed clothed with the garden
and the skies. There was something in

MANALIVE. 377

these last quiet colours that gave her a
setting and a supremacy ; and the twilight,
which concealed Diana's statelier figure and
Rosamund's braver array, exhibited and em-
phasized her, leaving her the lady of the
garden, and alone.

Wlren they spoke at last it was evident
that a conversation long fallen silent "was
being suddenly revived.

" But where is your husband taking you ? "
asked Diana in her practical voice.

" To an aunt," said Mary ; " that's just
the joke. There really is an aunt, and we
left the children with her when I arranged
to be turned out of the other boarding-
house down the road. We never take
more than a week of this kind of holi-
day, but sometimes we take two of them
together."

" Does the aunt mind much ? " asked
Rosamund innocently. " Of course, I dare
say it's very narrow-minded and — what's

378 MANALIVE.

that other word ? — you know, what Goliath
was — but I've known many aunts who
would think it — well, silly."

"Silly?" cried Mary with great heartiness.
" Oh, my Sunday hat ! I should think it
was silly ! But what do you expect ? He
really is a good man, and it might have
been snakes or something."

" Snakes ? " inquired Rosamund, with a
slightly puzzled interest.

" Uncle Harry kept snakes, and said they
loved him," replied Mary with perfect sim-
plicity. "Auntie let him have them in his
pockets, but not in the bedroom."

"And you — " began Diana, knitting her
dark brows a little.

" Oh, I do as auntie did," said Mary : "as
long as we're not away from the children
more than a fortnight together I play the
game. He calls me ' Manalive ; ' and you
must write it all in one word, or he's quite
flustered."

MANALIVE. 379

" But if men want things like that," began
Diana.

" Oh, what's the good of talking about
men?" cried Mary impatiently ; "why, one
might as well be a lady novelist or some
horrid thing. There aren't any men. There
are no such people. There's a man ; and
whoever he is he's quite different."

" So there's no safety," said Diana in a
low voice.

" Oh, I don't know," answered Mary,
lightly enough ; " there's only two things
generally true of them. At certain curious
times they're just fit to take care of us,
and they're never fit to take care of them-
selves."

" There is a gale getting up," said Rosa-
mund suddenly. " Look at those trees over
there, a long way off, and the clouds going
quicker."

" I know what you're thinking about,"
said Mary ; " and don't you be silly fools.

380 MANALIVE.

Don't you listen to the lady novelists. You
go down the king's highway ; for God's
truth, it is God's. Yes, my dear Michael
will often be extremely untidy. Arthur
Ingle wood will be worse — he'll be tidy.
But what else are all the trees and clouds
for, you silly kittens ? "

" The clouds and trees are all waving
about," said Rosamund. " There is a storm
coming, and it makes me feel quite excited,
somehow. Michael is really rather like a
storm : he frightens me and makes me
happy."

" Don't you be frightened," said Mary.
" All over, these men have one advantage :
they are the sort that go out."

A sudden thrust of wind through the trees
drifted the dying leaves along the path, and
they could hear the far-off trees roaring
faintly.

" I mean," said Mary, " they are the kind
that look outwards and get interested in the

MANALIVE. 381

world. It doesn't matter a bit whether it's
arguing, or bicycling, or breaking down the
ends of the earth as poor old Innocent does.
Stick to the man who looks out of the ;
1 window and tries to understand the world.
Keep clear of the man who looks in at the
window and tries to understand you. When
poor old Adam had gone out gardening
(Arthur will go out gardening), the other
sort came along and wormed himself in,
nasty old snake."

" You agree with your aunt," said Rosa-
mund, smiling : "no snakes in the bedroom."

" I didn't agree with my aunt very much,"
replied Mary simply, " but I think she was
right to let Uncle Harry collect dragons and
griffins, so long as it got him out of the
house."

Almost at the same moment lights sprang
up inside the darkened house, turning the
two glass doors into the garden into gates
of beaten gold. The golden gates were

382 MANALIVE.

4

burst open, and the enormous Smith, who
had sat like a clumsy statue for so many
hours, came flying and turning cart-wheels
down the lawn and shouting, "Acquitted !
acquitted ! " Echoing the cry, Michael
scampered across to Rosamund and wildly
swung her into a few steps of what was
supposed to be a waltz. But the company
knew Innocent and Michael by this time,
and their extravagances were gaily taken
for granted ; it was far more extraordinary
that Arthur Inglewood walked straight up
to Diana and kissed her as if it had been
his sister's birthday. Even Dr. Pym, though
he refrained from dancing, looked on with
real benevolence ; for indeed the whole of
the absurd revelation had disturbed him less
than the others ; he half supposed that such
irresponsible tribunals and insane discussions
were part of the mediaeval mummeries of
the Old Land.

While the tempest tore the sky as with

MANALIVE. 383

trumpets, window after window was lighted
up in the house within ; and before the
company, broken with laughter and the
buffeting of the wind, had groped their
way to the house again, they saw that the
great apish figure of Innocent Smith had
clambered out of his own attic window, and
roaring again and again, " Beacon House ! "
whirled round his head a huge log or trunk
from the wood fire below, of which the
river of crimson flame and purple smoke
drove out on the deafening air.

He was evident enough to have been seen
from three counties ; but when the wind
died down, and the party, at the top of their
evening's merriment, looked again for Mary
and for him, they were not to be found.

THE END.

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